Cantonese Chu-hou

Beef Stew

the comfort food of all comfort foods

for many Asians

This is Kau Kee, one of the top beef stew restaurants in Hong Kong. 

They open everyday at 11 am and people start standing in line as early as 10 am

 (picture from pre-Covid days)

The Cantonese Beef Stew is one of the most common dishes in noodle restaurants throughout Hong Kong and many Asian cities.  Yet because it is common, it is also a very difficult dish to master.  And popularity breeds great scrutiny.

There are literally thousands of recipes but none simple.  Many ingredients are not even available outside of Asia.

EbiNomi only offers this as a 'special'.  The preparation and cooking is a lengthy process, and with a small kitchen, this is not something we can handle properly on a regular basis.

So why does EbiNomi offer this?

We like a challenge.  To see if we can get close to the flavors we so fondly remembered.  So we actually made this for ourselves because we love this dish, but as restaurateurs, we don't know how to cook things in small quantities so we thought "why not spread the love"?

What's the backstory behind our recipe?

The recipe we used was given (sold?) to us by a master in Hong Kong who had retired.  He ran a small, neighborhood noodle shop in Hong Kong that was passed down by his parents.

A large clay pot similar to one of these

His kids are grown and became professionals and no longer interested to keep running the family business so he decided to close it down.  We heard about his closing so we went to eat there on one of the final days.  He was about to shut the shop down and a consolidator was to be there in a few days to remove all the equipment.

We got talking to the old man and listened to lots of interesting stories about how his parents kept the shop running during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong because the soldiers loved their noodles.

To make a long story short he told us that the ONE most valuable piece of equipment in the shop was the old large clay pot they stewed the beef stew in.  Somehow he suckered us into buying that from him for HK$8,000 (about US$1,000) and the recipe of the beef stew came with that.

So now EbiNomi owns a large clay pot.  Too large, fragile and expensive to ship to Hawaii, it is stored in a storage unit in Hong Kong.  So you can say that the recipe is free, or we had paid $8,000 for it. 

What is so special about this clay pot?

The clay pot is never meant to be emptied, or washed (especially no detergents).  Supposingly each night as the content is used, new broth and ingredients are added to it, day after day, week after week, year after year.  This aging is supposed to build the "taste and fragrance" that adds to the complexity of the stew.

No details about whether bacteria will grow under such unusual circumstance.  But I have not heard of anyone dying from eating Cantonese beef stews yet.

Can we share the recipe?

Sure we can tell you but then we will have to kill you.  But we can tell you that besides the beef, tendon and daikon, the seasoning ingredients include all these and more: Ginger, bay leaves, dried star anises, dehydrated citrus peels, scallions, zanthoxylum, cinnamon, femented bean curds, lanxangia tsaoko.... just to name a few

How do we know when this is available?

Subscribe to our Facebook, Instagram and other social media,  or send an email to us to get on our mailing list.  We will make an announcement whenever we make it.

Then I would suggest to place an order online so you don't miss out.  We make only a batch at a time each batch yields about 24 orders.