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Dad’s thinly-sliced braised beef shank

May 13th, 2018  |  Published in Uncategorized, What we savor

Braised beef shank takes a long time to prepare. You need to spend at least two hours standing beside the simmering casserole, and one night waiting for the fist-size chunks of beef to cool in the fridge—which is why I never watched the entire process when my father made it. When the beef is ready the next day, he would thinly slice a plateful and keep the rest in the fridge.

My family has lived in Nanjing, a city in south-east China, for more than 20 years. While most details of the first few years there are fuzzy to me, I can distinctly recall eating braised beef shank and watching Chinese-dubbed Batman cartoons in the tiny condo where we used to live.

Being the cook of the family, my father makes an array of dishes, but he considers braised beef shank his specialty, and he is right—none of the other beef dishes I’ve eaten has its perfect balance of beefiness, umami and spiciness. While the recipes for his other dishes changed from time to time, the recipe for the braised beef shank stayed the same: beef, green onion, ginger root, star anise, cinnamon stick, green Chinese peppercorn, sugar, Chinese cooking wine and dark soy sauce.

My father never thought about taking a picture of his braised beef shank even though he cooked it hundreds of times. This one was taken after I told him about this story.

My father braises beef shanks in large batches, probably four to five pounds a time, because I can eat one and a half pounds of meat in a day, all by myself. He often jokes that I would eat my mother and him instead if he didn’t put enough meat on table.

My meat-centered diet dates back to elementary school and junior high, when I would come home from school in the afternoon, frustrated with my math exams, and go straight to the fridge for the beef. I can’t explain it, but savory meat really cheers me up, and among all savory meats, thinly sliced beef is best for snacking. A few hours later, my father would refill the plate with beef and serve it for dinner, and I would happily empty the plate again. In retrospect, what I did was fitting—braised beef shank is always served as appetizer at restaurants, though for me, it was also the main course.

I never really appreciated the level of skill or amount of work it takes to cook braised beef shank. To be honest, I seldom cooked until my second year in university, when I decided to go on an exchange program to the U.K. I mean, why bother trying when your father is a university professor who works at home most of the time and cooks great meals? After I got to the U.K. and cooked a few batches of increasingly edible meats, I gradually realized how difficult it was to replicate my father’s dishes. But instead of experimenting more, I stopped and survived the semester on baked chicken breasts.

Recently I tried to cook braised beef shank again. The result was passable, but nowhere close to the original, so I called my father for instructions. He spent ten minutes giving random advice, blaming the pot I was using, the quality of the beef, or the spice combination, but when I asked him for a step-by-step guide, he said he couldn’t unless he thinks about it for a while.

“The recipe is like muscle memory, I’ll know what to do once I’m in the kitchen,” he said.

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