It hasn’t happened to me personally, but I am aware that unwary diners in Chinese restaurants are sometimes led astray by the apparently simple name of this Sichuanese dish: 水煮牛肉 (shui zhu niu rou). Translated literally, the name means ‘water-boiled beef’, or ‘beef boiled in water’.

Well, that sounds nice and simple, doesn’t it? Perhaps something that you can safely order for your elderly aunt who doesn’t really like spicy food?

Wrong.

‘Water-boiled beef’ contains just about everything from its armoury of spices that Sichuanese cuisine can put into a single dish: dried chillis, chilli-bean paste, Sichuan peppercorns and enough garlic to keep away any vampires for miles around … The picture below should suffice to convey a sense of the kind of dish that you’ll get if you order this one:

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Exactly how spicy the dish will be depends on the chef (and any instructions given by the diner): it does not have to be mind-blowingly hot, but it will be spicy. However, and as I hope will be clear by now, the ‘water’ in which the beef is boiled for this dish is lot more flavoursome than just plain old tap-water: the sauce needs to be red with spices!

Sometimes, it can be hard to navigate through a Chinese menu if the dishes have poetic but hard-to-fathom names such as ‘Phoenix and Dragon’, ‘Eight Sea Treasures’ and ‘Buddha Jumped over the Wall’. So, when you encounter a dish with a seemingly simple name such as ‘Water-Boiled Beef’, you might think, “Great, that’s clear enough”, and order.

However, this is one dish where the literal translation is not helpful!

Happy dining!

EDIT: Okay, so my original article about ‘water-boiled beef’ attracted a fair amount of interest (thank you, Quorans). So, and spurred on by that, I decided that, for the first time in a long time, I’d make it for dinner last night - picture below. Now, I’d be the first to admit that, in comparison with the picture above, my ‘water-boiled beef’ does not look quite as attractive: next time, I’ll add less chilli-bean paste (doubanjiang) and more chili paste, to get that gorgeous red colour in the broth that I crave. However, my picture does show more clearly than the picture above that the dish is in fact a ‘layered’ dish: when you are almost ready to serve, you quickly cook some rice noodles or rice sticks and blanch some vegetables. Yesterday, I used bean-sprouts, shredded Chinese lettuce and enoki mushrooms (but, if I could only choose one, I’d go for bean-sprouts, as they add a really nice ‘crunch’ to the finished dish). To serve the dish, get a deep serving bowl and add everything in layers: the cooked rice noodles or sticks, the blanched vegetables and finally the beef. Finish the dish off by ladling over the ‘water’ (i.e., the spicy broth) and then sprinkling over the green part of chopped spring onions (scallions) and some freshly ground Sichuan pepper. You can add some chilli oil but, whereas the shop-bought variety often contains a fish sediment and therefore does not have a ‘bright’, ‘clean’ taste, I’d leave out the chilli oil unless it’s homemade and without the fish sediment: this dish is about ‘fresh’, ‘bright’ flavours, which is what you really want here.

Happy eating!