Shaking Beef Best Thing I Ever Ate

Open for about 20 years, the Slanted Door in San Francisco is nothing curt of an institution. For most of that time, chef Charles Phan has been serving what has go one of the nigh famous dishes in the urban center: Shaking Beef, a simple nonetheless legendary stir-fry of beef and onion served over a bed of watercress.

While the dish was added to the eating house'southward menu in 1996, the inspiration for the dish dates dorsum further. "It started a long time ago, maybe xviii or nineteen years," Phan says of his idea for the Shaking Beef. "I learned well-nigh the dish on my offset visit to Vietnam, I had the dish at this empty eatery." He decided to approach his take on Shaking Beef from a different perspective: "We take something unproblematic and classic and go far more most the local ingredients and the local farmers here ... the dish gets better using meliorate ingredients." Fast forward to today, and Shaking Beefiness has become one of the restaurant's signatures. When Phan says "it just took off," he isn't exaggerating. The eatery sells so many orders of the dish that he estimates they spend roughly $380,000 yearly on beef for the dish alone.

Eater SF editor Allie Pape weighs in:

"The Slanted Door deserves credit for beingness one of the first restaurants to bring Vietnamese food to an upscale audience, and this is probably their nigh famous dish. It hits all the correct notes: sweet, savory, salty, compact."

Beneath, the elements of the Slanted Door'due south Shaking Beef:

1. The Beef

It didn't take long for Phan to turn his back on ownership commodity meats, dropping them from his carte du jour within a few years of opening. Phan now simply uses grass-fed beefiness, and he is currently buying from Estancia Beef, a large-calibration grass-fed beef purveyor that is USDA-certified "natural." "We accept a huge need," Phan explains. "Non everyone can supply us."

Although the Vietnamese dish is more often made with flank, Phan goes for filet mignon, which is much more than tender. He cuts the beefiness into ane-inch cubes. This is a nod to, but not a straight copy of, the traditional bo luc lac preparation (luc lac refers to the sound of die). "It'south more like diced beefiness," he says, explaining that he cuts the beef larger than is traditional for his rendition of Shaking Beef. After it's cutting, the cubed filet pieces marinate in common salt, pepper, sugar, and oil overnight.

2. The Vegetables

When it comes to the vegetables in his Shaking Beef, Phan turns to the California bounty. Onions are provided by Veritable Vegetable, an organic vegetable distributor. Along with onions, Phan besides uses scallions from Wo Sing, a visitor that the Slanted Door has worked with since day i. The final component here is garlic, which Phan buys from Christopher Ranch, an organic garlic producer based in Gilroy, California.

The final vegetable component of the dish is a bed of watercress from Sausalito Springs subcontract in Sonoma. The watercress isn't actually prepped, rather it is laid on the serving platter to class a bed underneath the stir-fry. Phan notes that "the heat of the beef will melt the salad" equally diners are eating.

iii. The Sauce

The primary sauce in the dish is extremely simple. To make it, Phan combines sugar with soy sauce, fish sauce, and rice wine vinegar. The stir-fry sauce is virtually like a "finishing" component Phan says, added towards the end of the cooking process.

4. The Assembly

The key pieces of equipment Phan uses to create the Shaking Beefiness are his commercial-grade range and the wok. He notes that the wok, combined with the higher power range, allows for fast and hot cooking that is basically impossible for a home cook to emulate. With the wok, Phan can prepare 2 orders at a fourth dimension.

He begins the cooking process by calculation oil to the wok. Once it is smoking, he adds the filet. Getting an fifty-fifty dark-brown on the filet is a priority. He sears on each side and "all four corners," and it takes nigh two to three minutes for the beefiness to become "crispy but not overcooked." Afterward the meat is done, he drains the oil. Doing and then allows the flavors of the dish to remain clear and clean: the used oil "dirties up the flavors of your food."

Next Phan adds fresh oil and brown the garlic. He then adds the onions, scallions, and the stir-fry sauce. He also adds a sliver of Straus Family Creamery butter to bring information technology together, and so tosses the ingredients. "You lot don't really shake information technology," he says.

The terminal component is served on the side: a lime dipping sauce. The sauce, like stir-fry sauce and the marinade, is quite unproblematic: it's salt, pepper, and lime juice. He said that when he served the dish with a wedge of lime, patrons would clasp the lime over the dish and "ruin information technology." Instead, he created the sauce for them. "We give them the sauce so they dip it," he says. "People were assuming that information technology was like lemon over squid. If you brand the sauce, it's got common salt and information technology makes a difference."