WOTD: 葱爆羊肉

Home cooking

葱爆羊肉 (cong1 bao4 yang2rou, “Exploding Onion Mutton”) is a Northern Chinese dish, bountiful in flavor and surprisingly easy to throw together at home. The hack is to pick up thinly sliced mutton/lamb from the grocery store freezer aisle. Though intended for hot pot (火锅 huo3 guo1), you can easily throw it in a wok with some sliced 大葱, 孜然, and 香菜 (Chinese onion, cumin, and cilantro, respectively).

葱:local “Chinese” onions are basically just divided into big and small. The small version being what we’d call shallots or green onions. “Regular” white, round onions are marked as foreign, i.e. 洋葱 (yang2 cong1, “ocean onion”), though my supermarket lists them as 葱头 (cong1 tou2, “onion head”) and red onions are purple in Chinese (紫葱 zi3 cong1).

“爆” (bao4) means explosion and in this dish name refers to a cooking technique: 爆炒 (bao4chao3), though how it is different than regular just stir-frying eludes me.

羊肉 (yang2rou4) refers to lamb or mutton per the general construction of animal + meat = edible.

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