Macau Minchi (免治肉粒饭)

A classic ground meat stir fry

So today, I wanted to teach you how to make Macanese Minchi. It’s one of the most iconic dishes in Macao, and really emblematic of Macanese food in general.

What’s Macanese food? That’s… a whole can of worms. The food in Macao generally falls into one of three categories – Cantonese (there’s some great Cantonese food in Macao), Portuguese, and Macanese – i.e. the food of the Macanese people. The Macanese people, meanwhile, can sort of be thought of as a mix of Portuguese and Cantonese… but that simplification hides a much more convoluted tale. I won’t pretend to be an expert here – I’m certainly no ethnographer – but I’d highly recommend wikisurfing the topic if you’re so inclined.

Macanese food, meanwhile, is… fascinating. It’s a true mix of Western and Cantonese foods – a real mind fuck in the best possible way. On the menu? Stuff like “Diabo” – a stew with a bunch of different leftover banquet meats (e.g. Char Siu, Siu Yuk, Brisket) together with tomato, potato, egg, and Cantonese sour pickles. Tacho (a.k.a. "Gweilo Buddha Jumps over the Wall") – a stew with a similar mix of ingredients, plus shrimp paste and Cauliflower. African chicken – a milder Piri Piri chicken with an obvious Goan influence. Spinach Paste – Western-style stewed spinach with garlic and shrimp paste. And that shrimp paste? It’s called Balichao… which’s Macao’s own slightly Western-style take on Cantonese-style shrimp paste.

And of course, Minchi. From everything I can tell, word ‘minchi’ itself seems to be derived from the English work “mince”, although I still haven’t been able to get a reliable source on the topic. But it does communicate the essence of the dish – it’s… stir-fried mince meat.

There’s a mind boggling amount of Minchi variations… it’s one of those dishes where every family seems to have their own way of doing it. This version is pretty close to how you’d get it if you ate at a Macanese restaurant in Macao - it’s some marinated minced meat fried with sausage, onion, and bay leaf… served with fried potatoes, laid over a bed of white rice, and - in that ever-so-Portugese way - topped with a fried egg.

Ingredients

1. Pork Leg (后腿肉), 250g -and- Beef Chuck (牛肩肉), 250g; Both 80/20; Minced. So right. We’ll be hand-mincing these guys, but if you have your own meat grinder feel free to use that too. A food processor might end up a touch on the pasty side, but would still be an acceptable solution. If you’ve got a real butcher, they’ll grind it for you too, of course. Just try not to use the standard supermarket ground beef. Why? Put simply… that stuff is… bad. It barely makes for an acceptable burger, and here we don’t have cheese and a whole bunch of fixings to hide the mince under. The mince’s the star of the show here, so it should be a proper mince – not the sad, discolored, shrink-wrapped stuff that you find at most supermarkets in the West.

2. Marinade for the meat: 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp sugar, 1 tbsp white wine (白葡萄酒), ¼ tsp freshly ground black pepper (黑胡椒), 2 tsp light soy sauce (生抽), 1 tsp dark soy sauce (老抽). You can already see the Western influence here! By white wine we mean like, actual white wine. From grapes. It’s basically the Macanese equivalent of Shaoxing and is used in much the same way. Black pepper also makes an appearance (black pepper is a very regional thing in China).

3. Sausage, preferably Portugese Linguiça (香肠/葡国香肠), 250g. Kind of optional bit, but this recipe was balanced around including it. Feel free to go liberal with the sausage subs here – it’s what we had to do, honestly. In the video, we used a Harbin sausage (哈尔滨红肠), which’s basically… a kielbasa. It worked, it tasted good. But a much more authentic sub would likely be a Spanish-style chorizo or an Italian sausage, so you might actually be able to get closer to the proper taste than we did (sausage is expensive and tough to source in Shenzhen).

4. Optional ‘marinade’ for the sausage: ¼ tsp Cantonese rose wine (玫瑰露酒), ½ tsp sugar. Ok, so here’s the deal – we saw one source (in English actually, the chef of Fat Rice in Chicago IIRC) mention in passing that some Macanese linguiça took inspiration from Cantonese Lap Cheong and were seasoned with Cantonese rose wine (and were a bit sweeter). So on a whim, we mixed some sugar and rose wine into the sausage, and… we really liked what it did for the dish. But just know that this might just be us up the creek with no paddle here, feel free to skip.

5. Potatoes, 500g. Russets or something similarly starchy. Cut into 2 cm cubes, blanched, then fried.

6. Onion (洋葱), 1. Minced.

7. Garlic, ~4 cloves. Minced. Some recipes also use shallots.

8. Dried bay leaf (香叶), 1g; 4-5 large leaves. I’d call this a real hallmark of the dish, if only there weren’t counter-examples of some Macanese families skipping the bay leaf. The vast majority of Minchi is fried with bay though.

9. Seasoning while stir-frying: 1 tbsp white wine (白葡萄酒), ½ tsp salt, ½ tsp sugar, 1 tsp light soy sauce (生抽), ¼ tsp black pepper (黑胡椒), 1 tbsp rice vinegar (米醋).

10. Egg, 1. For frying.

Also, interestingly, olive oil is a really common frying oil in Macanese cooking – basically the Macanese equivalent of peanut oil. So if you’re used to reaching the olive oil, go for it.

Process

Super high level overview here: mince your meat, then marinate it. Fry the mince meat once until dry and crumbly, then stir-fry everything together. Serve with white rice, fried potatoes, and a sunny side up egg.

1. Mince the meat. If hand mincing, first get the beef and pork into a nice fine dice. Then just grab a couple cleavers and… just start chopping, periodically folding the meat over itself to help it break down. Unlike something like a dumpling filling, we’re not looking to get it into a paste or anything… so if you’re quick just ~5 minutes of chopping should be good enough. You’re looking for something about this consistency no matter which mincing route you take.

2. Marinate the minced meat. Marinate for ~30 minutes.

3. Prep the rest of the ingredients: cut the potatoes into 2 cm cubes, mince the onion and garlic, finely dice the sausage. Marinate the sausage if you’re going that route with us.

4. Blanch the potato in boiling water for two minutes, together with a tablespoon of salt. Toss the potato cubes in the salted boiling water and cover. Let those cook for two minutes, then take them out to drain. Don’t shock in cool water, it can break down the potato cubes.

5. Once dry, pan-fry the potato cubes until golden brown and crispy, ~20 minutes over medium-low heat -or- deep fry them at ~180C until golden brown. I would probably just deep fry these if it were me, but I always feel a little bad calling for deep-frying in an ostensibly homey recipe like this. So if pan-frying, over medium-low flame together with ~1/4 cup of oil… add the potatoes in one even-ish layer (no need to be overly obsessive with the whole ‘one layer’ thing and fry… periodically stirring them around, then rearranging them again into a rough layer. Season with a touch of salt (let’s say… start with ½ tsp and go from there to taste) and optionally black pepper. Reserve.

6. Fry the minced meat (together with the sausage IF your sausage is uncooked) until browned and loose. As always, first longyau – get your wok piping hot, shut off the heat, add in the oil – here about one tablespoon – and give it a swirl to get a nice non-stick surface. With the flame on medium, add in the meat. Try your best to break up the minced meat, and we like to accomplish that by aggressively chopping at it with a spatula. After ~5 minutes, the meat should look like this – loose and cooked. Then, lower the heat to medium-low and continue to fry for five minutes until the meat is browned, like this.

7. Stir fry the Minchi. As always, first longyau – get your wok piping hot, shut off the heat, add in the oil – here 1 tablespoon – and give it a swirl to get a nice nonstick surface. Heat on medium now:

• Onion, in. Fry for ~5 minutes until the onion is softened and has changed color.

• Scooch the onion up the side of the wok, then add in a bit more oil - ~1/2 tbsp. Add in the garlic.

• Fry garlic for ~30 seconds or until fragrant.

• Add in the dried bay leaves. Fry everything together for ~30 seconds.

• Pour the 1 tbsp white wine over the spatula and around the sides of the wok. Quick mix.

• Sausage, in. Assuming your sausage is a cooked one (if you cooked it in step #6 just add it in with the other meat, obviously). 30 second fry.

• Minced meat, in. 1 minute fry together.

• Season with the salt, sugar, black pepper, and light soy sauce. Brief mix.

• Pour the 1 tbsp rice vinegar over the spatula and around the sides of the wok. Heat off, out.

Ok, so there’s one final step here – frying the egg. Reddit formatting really hates when I break up a numbered list, so…

Fry the Egg. Whatever method you like. I like tossing ~two tbsp of oil or so in a cast iron skillet, then heating that up over medium-high heat until bubbles form around a pair of chopsticks. Crack an egg in, let it set, shut off the heat. Tilt the pan so the oil pools, then spoon it over the whites of the egg. Once the whites are cooked, I pour one spoon of oil over the yolk because I personally like my sunny-side up yolks more ‘gooey’ then leaking all over the plate (though tbh with a bed of rice like this dish, I could go either way). Season with salt and pepper, or whatever.

Assemble: This dish makes six – a rarity in these recipes, I know. Over a bed of white rice, spoon over a bunch of your minchi. Make a bit of a ring around everything with the fried potatoes, top with your egg. As an aside… random totally super untraditional thing that I kind of like on the side with this dish… some vinegary American or Mexican hot sauce, specifically for the potatoes.