A small beef ball, which is rich in energy and full of elasticity, is full of juice and leaves fragrance on your teeth and cheeks! Chaoshan people like to roll the original soup, and then add garlic crisp and celery beads, which is not enough to eat!
I used to go home during the winter and summer vacations when I was studying, and my classmates would ask me to buy some beef balls and bring them back. At that time, I thought to myself, "Why do you want to bring it all the way?" It wasn't until I once ate beef balls sold outside here that I realized that the so-called chaoshan beef meatball here was all mixed with starch and some meat, and it didn't taste good if you bit it.
I believe everyone has eaten a lot of beef balls, so do you know how chaoshan beef meatball is made?
Although it is called chaoshan beef meatball, beef balls were actually not invented by Chaoshan people, but by Hakkas!
At the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the Republic of China, there were people shouting and selling all kinds of things in Chaoshan area, including beef balls made by Hakkas. Smart Chaoshan people saw that the beef balls tasted good, so they imitated and transplanted them and improved them into the present beef balls!
Before all kinds of machines were invented, beef balls were made by hand. Use a special square solid iron bar to beat a whole piece of beef ham into minced meat like a drum, and then proceed to the next operation.
But now this kind of operation is very rare!
Maybe sometimes you will see some merchants advertise that they beat beef balls by hand, that is, they beat them there with iron bars, but in fact, most of them are just gimmicks. If he is a family-owned workshop only for local people to buy, the 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 pure manual and hand-beating. In fact, it is not necessarily that hand-beating is not necessarily more delicious than machine. Why? You will understand after reading the next introduction to the production process.
1. Let's talk about hand-beating.
Choose beef from the hind legs, because the hind legs are rich in lean meat and tough enough, which is suitable for making elastic beef balls. After being beaten into minced meat with an iron bar, you should start to stir and beat with both hands after adding seasoning, because beef balls are easy to deteriorate due to the influence of temperature after being beaten into minced meat, so this step must be done in one go. It is very tiring to beat dozens of kilograms of meat with different hands, and once it is not done in place, basically these meats will be wasted.
This is also one of the reasons why hand-beating is not necessarily better than machine. There are too many uncertain factors in hand-beating. Generally, only a master who has worked for more than ten years can be handy.
You can't stop after you hit hard. You must immediately squeeze them into balls by hand and put them in hot water to set them. It takes time and effort to go through a whole process. If you endure enough, you can only make up to 100 kilograms a day. Therefore, it is basically impossible for those online sales to be made by hand.
2. The beef balls made by machine may not taste bad.
General beef ball machine
The process of machine beating is the same as that of the previous hand beating, except that the manual work is replaced by a machine. First, put the meat into a meat grinder and grind it into minced meat, then put it into a special machine and keep stirring. A bucket will be left 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 during beating.
Some people will squeeze the balls into hot water by hand after beating, and some will directly use the ball machine to squeeze out uniform balls.
This is a 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 all mix some pork, and the mixing ratio in Chaoshan is generally 2/8 or 3/7. In addition to cost considerations, mixed meat also neutralizes the taste of two kinds of meat. But please don't get me wrong, all the meat used in chaoshan beef meatball is fresh and warm, so the beef balls are delicious enough.
Other ingredients, such as monosodium glutamate, salt, fish sauce, etc., are different from one method to another, but the one seasoning that will be added in chaoshan beef meatball 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, which can generally be used for cooking soup, such as beef ball seaweed soup, beef ball soup powder, etc., and can also be used for barbecue. After being cut in half, it can be changed into a flower knife, brushed with barbecue sauce and baked. It is very delicious, and it is also a must-have dish in Guangdong.