Question for Paul

I'm very enticed by a recent video of Mapo Braised Beef: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaAMXeoyoeo

I am no kind of a cook for Chinese dishes (and I won't ever be because Pumpkin does not care for hot/spicy nor sour food).

But I'd be interested to hear your opinion. Is this a reasonable dish to make? Is it sensible to make a 'Sichuan roux'? How different is the traditional way to make it?

Interesting video. Mapo tofu is one of the most famous Sichuanese dishes. It is made with the same spices and aromatics as the dish in the video, but it is a quick stir-fry, not a braise. It also has some ground beef as well as the tofu. The tofu is cut into chopstick-friendly cubes. First the ground beef is browned in a small amount of oil. Then, pushing the ground beef to one side, you briefly cook the sichuan peppercorns and hot bean sauce until the fragrance comes up, then add the aromatics and again briefly cook until the aroma comes up. Then you add some stock and let it all simmer a minute or so before adding a cornstarch slurry. Then in go chile oil and residue and finally the tofu, which is stir-fried for a few minutes.

This mapo beef dish uses the mapo spices and aromatics, but with beef cheek meat (a very Chinese ingredient) instead of the customary tofu. Since beef cheek is a tough cut of meat it has to be slow-braised (as the video says, about three hours!) rather than stir-fried. Customarily this would be done using a Sichuanese riff on the red-cooking (braised in soy sauce) technique seen universally in China. In Sichuan, beef is red-cooked using primarily doubanjiang (hot fermented bean paste), black beans, and Sichuan peppercorn as the primary flavoring rather than dark soy sauce. The beef usually is parboiled rather than browned before being stewed. At the end the sauce is either boiled down or thickened with a starch slurry.

The technique in the video is not at all traditional. Browning the beef first is in line with the tradition of how the ground beef is treated in mapo tofu. The rather large pieces of meat are also in line with tradition--they would be cut into chopstick-friendly pieces after the braise. The roux-based stewing technique strongly reminds me of how Cajun gumbo is made. I suspect that's the Western technique being borrowed here. I note that he uses the term Holy Trinity for the aromatics. That is the common name for the Cajun trio of onion, celery, and green bell pepper used in numerous Cajun and Creole dishes.

So I would call what we have here mapo beef gumbo.

-Paul W.

Thanks, Paul.

Gumbo and Jeff posted in on Mardi Gras!
That actually looks very good, and I liked the video- may look up more from him.
I actually did just make a roux, for shrimp etoufee last night (a day late)