Sichuan Love Affair
Read: 5 minutes
21 March 2025
It all started a couple of years ago when we visited Berlin. The sheer number of authentic Chinese restaurants to choose from was incredible. We stumbled upon a Sichuan restaurant called Jolly’s, and the pictures on the menu looked quite different from the Chinese food we had experienced before. Intrigued, we decided to order a variety of dishes, one of them happened to be a poached beef dish known by the chinese name Shui Zhu Niu Rou, or water-boiled beef.
It was love at first bite. The bold flavours, the numbing spiciness from Sichuan peppercorns, thin slices of beef and that hot broth bursting with deep umami flavour, finished with a couple of tablespoons of oil, it was unlike anything we had ever tasted before. We went back twice before we had to return home.
The first thing I did when we got back was search for authentic Sichuan cuisine in Düsseldorf. Luckily, we have a great selection of Asian restaurants here. That’s when we found a chinese restaurant called Dong Wu, and wow did it deliver. They call the dish Bowl Bowl Beef, and it was so good that we went there every single weekend for three months straight!
That’s how our love affair with this hardcore Chinese dish began. Every time we traveled, whether to Milan, Paris, Bordeaux, Amsterdam, or Helsinki, we made it a mission to find and try different interpretations of this main dish. Eventually, I decided it was time to try recreating this authentic type of Sichuan food myself.
I visited our local Asian store, searching for the right ingredients of the Sichuan mala sauce like chili bean paste, dried chili peppers, and light soy sauce and soon after, I was cooking it at home. Since I was making it so often, I started ordering from online grocers for convenience.
How to Eat Poached Sichuan Beef the Right Way
One important thing to know about this poached beef dish: it’s not a soup. The best way to eat it is with a separate bowl of steamed rice. You scoop some rice into your bowl, add a portion of succulent beef slices on a bed of vegetables of crispy vegetables like napa cabbage, bean sprouts and oyster mushrooms, topped with green onion, garlic and drizzle a bit of that flavorful sauce finished with plenty of hot oil. Ideally, you have a giant bowl of Sichuan beef and a big bowl of rice, so everyone can serve themselves. It’s a full-on Sichuan dinner experience, one that brings people together, just like it did for my wife and me.
I hope you try making this dish yourself and fall in love with it the way we did. If you do, leave a comment on the recipe page, I’d love to hear your thoughts!