The Sinosphere · Volume 35, The Sour Jar, the Steam Funnel and a Border That Runs Both Ways
Mafen, Guilin horse-meat rice noodles
Guilin, Guangxi
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 10 minutes
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Guilin, Guangxi. A Qing-dynasty variant of Dish 8, named here on its own terms rather than folded into it.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. Using the lu shui from Dish 8. 10 minutes.
Ingredients
- 300 g horse meat, thinly sliced (or a well-marbled beef substitute, see Sourcing)
- 500 ml the lu shui from Dish 8
- 400 g fresh or dried thin rice noodles
- to taste pickled vegetable and spring onion, to finish
Method
- Poach the sliced meat briefly in the hot lu shui until just cooked through.
- Scald the rice noodles and drain into small, shallow bowls, traditionally a fifth the size of a standard serving, since the dish is eaten as several dozen small refilled bowls across a sitting rather than one large one.
- Top each small bowl with a little of the poached meat, a ladle of lu shui, pickled vegetable and spring onion.
- Serve in the traditional small-bowl, continually-refilled style if entertaining, rather than as one large portion.
What a modern chef changes
The same small-bowl ritual, with a cleaner cut of meat.
Rung 1
Method
- Sous vide the meat at 56°C for 45 minutes for an evenly pink, tender result, then finish with a very brief dip in the hot lu shui just before serving rather than poaching it through from raw.
- Serve the small-bowl format deliberately, not apologetically: this dish's real elevation is precision in each small bowl's seasoning balance, not a change to the communal, repeated-refill way it is traditionally eaten.