It is easy to get in touch with beef balls when going to Chaoshan area. How are beef balls made?

There is a saying in Guangdong that "eat in Guangzhou, do in Fengcheng and taste in Chaoshan". Chaoshan cuisine is absolutely famous in Guangdong, so many people think of Chaoshan cuisine when they mention it. Beef balls are an indispensable cultural symbol in Chaoshan cuisine.

A small beef ball, full of energy, full of elasticity, full of juice, and fragrant teeth and cheeks! Chaoshan people like to roll the original soup, add garlic crisp and celery beads, not enough to eat!

I used to go home during the winter and summer vacations when I was studying, and my classmates asked me to buy some beef balls to take home. At that time, I thought to myself, "Why did you bring it all the way?" I didn't know until I ate the beef balls sold outside here. The so-called chaoshan beef meatball here is all mixed with starch and some meat, and it's not delicious to take a bite.

I believe everyone has eaten a lot of beef balls, so do you know what chaoshan beef meatball did?

Although it is called chaoshan beef meatball, beef balls were actually not invented by Chaoshan people, but by Hakkas!

In the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China, people in Chaoshan area peddled all kinds of things, including beef balls made by Hakkas. Smart Chaoshan people saw that beef balls tasted good, so they imitated transplantation and improved them into the present beef balls!

Before all kinds of machines were invented, beef balls were all made by hand. Beat a whole piece of beef and ham into minced meat like a drum with a special square solid iron bar, and then proceed to the next operation.

But now this kind of operation is rare!

Maybe sometimes you will see some merchants advertising that they are hitting beef balls by hand or hitting them there with iron bars, but most of them are just gimmicks. If he is a family-owned workshop only for local people, his credibility will be higher. If it is sold on an online platform, 99% of them are not handmade beef balls, because the efficiency of handmade beef balls is too low to meet so many orders for online sales.

There is a misunderstanding here. Many people will automatically think of delicious food after seeing the words handmade and patted by hand. Actually, it's not necessarily. Hand-beating is not necessarily better than machine. Why? You will understand after reading the introduction of the production process.

1. Let's talk about thugs.

Choose beef from the hind legs, because the hind legs are rich in lean meat and tough enough to make elastic beef balls. After the minced meat is ground with iron bars, it is necessary to start stirring and patting with both hands after adding seasoning, because the beef balls are easy to deteriorate due to the influence of temperature after being ground into minced meat, so this step must be done in one go. It is very tiring to beat dozens of pounds of meat with different hands, and once it is not done properly, it is basically wasted.

This is one of the reasons why hand-beating is not necessarily better than machine. There are too many uncertainties in hand play. Generally, only a master who has worked for more than ten years can be handy.

If you hit hard, you can't stop. You must immediately knead them into balls by hand and then put them in hot water to solidify. It takes time and energy to go through a complete process. Enough, you can only make up 100 Jin a day at most. Therefore, it is basically impossible for those online sales to be made by hand.

The beef balls made by the machine may taste good.

Universal beef ball machine

The process of machine beating is the same as the previous hand beating, except that the hand is replaced by a machine. Firstly, the meat is ground into minced meat in a meat grinder, and then it is put into a special machine for continuous stirring. There will be a bucket outside this machine to pour ice cubes for you, because the temperature will rise when the machine is stirred, and the beef will go bad when the temperature is high, so ice cubes should be added to cool the machine when it is stirred.

Some people will squeeze the ball into hot water by hand after playing, and some will directly squeeze out the uniform ball with a ball machine.

This is the general production process of beef balls.

It can be said that there are basically no beef balls made of pure beef on the market.

They are all mixed with some pork, and the mixing ratio in Chaoshan is generally 2/8 or 3/7. In addition to cost considerations, the mixed meat also neutralizes the flavors of the two meats. But please don't get me wrong. The meat used in chaoshan beef meatball is fresh and moist, so beef balls are delicious enough.

Other ingredients, such as monosodium glutamate, salt and fish sauce. Various methods are different, but one seasoning added to Chaoshan beef balls is garlic crisp (see the link for the production method: only this seasoning can be called authentic Chaoshan soup powder, and today I will teach you the detailed method of the home version).

Beef balls have a wide range of uses, and can generally be used to make soup, such as beef ball seaweed soup, beef ball soup powder and so on. , can also be used for barbecue. After cutting it in half, you can change it into a flower knife, brush it with barbecue sauce and bake it. It's delicious, and it's also a must-order dish in Guangdong.