The Proper Chinese Touch Your Homemade Beef And Broccoli Is Missing

Beef and broccoli is one of my very favorite Chinese takeout entrees, along with crab rangoons, which is, I know, unapologetically American-created. Because it's made with a short list of ingredients, beef and broccoli is pretty user-friendly for the beginner home cook. But if you're going with a homemade version, why not take one tiny step in making it extra special by seeking out an ingredient that will amplify the dish with an authentic flavor? The ingredient is called gai lan, or Chinese broccoli, and all you need to do is swap it in for the everyday, grocery store-variety of broccoli you've been using.

While American broccoli has thick stems and crowns of closely structured, tiny florets, gai lan has thinner stems and dark green, flat leaves, sometimes with small yellow flowers scattered throughout (which are completely edible). Some say the flavor is reminiscent of both regular broccoli and broccoli rabe combined, which makes gai lan taste slightly bitter, but not outrageously so. In fact, if you can't track down gai lan, you could try using both broccoli and broccoli rabe together in the dish. 

Chinese broccoli is generally available year round and can be found in Chinese markets and grocery stores. If you live in an area with a significant Chinese population, you may even spot the ingredient in larger grocery store chains (including America's largest). As for the beef, go with flank steak, the best cut for stir fry.

Beef and broccoli is believed to have been introduced to America in the 1920s following the arrival of many Chinese immigrants to the San Francisco area. Naturally, they brought their recipes from home, one of them being a Cantonese dish called Jie Lan Niu Rou, or Gai Lan Chao Niu Rou, which combined beef, gai lan, and aromatics with a flavorful sauce. The broccoli they were used to couldn't be found on American soil, so like many immigrants they substituted traditional ingredients with what they could find. In this case, American broccoli.

As the newly-settled Chinese began opening restaurants, Americans developed a taste for their flavorful dishes like beef and broccoli. Many popular dishes were Americanized versions of authentic Chinese dishes, or created to cater to Americans' tastes. Would Americans have still enjoyed the dish in those early days if it was served with gai lan? We don't know. But the appearance of the kind of broccoli they were used to surely made the dish more approachable to them, albeit at the expense of authenticity. Today, more people appreciate authenticity when it comes to food, and using gai lan instead of broccoli for beef and broccoli is a great way to bring the dish closer to what it originally would have been.