You’ve seen BAO’s famous Taipei butter rice on Instagram – here’s how to make it at home

BAO might be best known for its steamed buns, but the Taipei butter rice comes in close second. Founders Erchen Chang, Shing Tat Chung and Wai Ting Chung explain its origins – and reveal the recipe

The founding trio came up with this recipe while exploring different cuts of beef for their restaurant (BAO)

For a while, I was obsessed with steak served with café de Paris butter, so Shing and I frequented Le Relais de Venise l’Entrecote when we used to live in Soho. If you had to close your eyes and picture what a “French bistro” would look like, this would be the place: waitresses in classic outfits, tables too close to each other, a simple menu with just steak, fries and salads. I loved the sauce so much I took Anais there, too, to dissect their delicious house sauce. After having it, Anais came up with the idea of creating our Taipei butter made with our spiced beef butter as a base.

We wanted to use a cut of beef that was super tender when flash-grilled and had a good marbling of fat running through it. Working with Philip Warren and Son in Cornwall, we picked out the Denver cut, which is an often overlooked cut of beef from the shoulder. The beef is aged for 40 days in a vacuum-packed bag, meaning no moisture can enter but simultaneously the meat is able to breathe. The ageing allows the enzymes in the meat to break down, so that when flash-grilling, the meat is soft and not chewy.

As well as going through many different beef cuts, the beginnings of the dish took many different forms – a skewer, a dish that was supposed to be in a bao, and a bowl of rice. Sometimes the best dishes come from that last bit of sweat. At the eleventh hour, when the pressure hit, this dish was created and is now what we consider a classic.

The rice is slathered with the Taipei butter before the beef is precisely fanned out in a spiral pattern on top, with the golden soy-cured egg yolk sitting in the middle.

40-day aged beef and Taipei butter rice

Serves: 2

Ingredients:

For the beef:

80g onion, diced

2 cloves garlic

80g vegetarian oyster sauce

2 tbsp honey

4 tsp Chinkiang black rice vinegar

4 tsp rapeseed (canola) oil

2 tsp premium soy sauce

1 x 200g 40-day aged Denver steak

Splash of vegetable oil

Flaky sea salt

For the Taipei butter:

110g Spiced Beef Butter (see below)

90g butter, at room temperature

30g shallot, very finely chopped

40ml light soy sauce

½ tsp chilli powder

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

½ tsp ground star anise

Pinch of ground white pepper

7g basil, finely chopped

15g coriander (cilantro), finely chopped

7g curly parsley, finely chopped

For the rice:

150g short-grain rice (preferably Chishang or Japanese sushi rice)

150ml filtered water

To serve:

60ml Rice Dressing (see below)

2 Soy-cured Egg Yolks (see below)

Urfa chilli flakes, to taste

Method:

For the beef:

A day in advance, put the onion and garlic into a blender and blend until they form a smooth paste. Tip into a bowl and whisk with the vegetarian oyster sauce, honey, vinegar, rapeseed (canola) oil and soy sauce. Add the steak and stir to coat, then cover and leave to marinate in the refrigerator overnight.

The first cookbook from London’s cult favorite restaurant BAO offers a taste of Taiwanese food culture (Phaidon)

For the Taipei butter:

Put all the ingredients except the herbs into a bowl and blend using a hand held blender. If the blending makes the butter mixture warm, leave it to cool. When cool, stir in the herbs and chill. There will be more butter than is needed for this recipe, but it can be stored in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to 1 month or in the freezer for up to 3 months.

For the rice:

Half an hour before you want to eat, take the beef and Taipei butter out of the refrigerator.

Wash the rice thoroughly, 3 times. After the final rinse, tip the rice into a bowl, cover with cold water and leave to soak for 30 minutes.

Pour the filtered water into a saucepan and bring to the boil. Drain the soaked rice and add to the pan. When the water is boiling again, put a lid on, reduce the heat to low and cook for 18 minutes. Open the lid to check that the rice is cooked and glistening but not wet. Put the lid back on, remove from the heat and leave the rice to rest for 10 minutes before serving (this process allows the remaining steam to absorb back into the grains, resulting in fluffy and bouncy rice). At no point remove the lid from the pan.

To assemble:

While the rice is resting, preheat the oven to 150C/300F/gas mark 2 and place 2 shallow bowls in the oven to warm.

Heat a heavy-based frying pan (skillet) over a medium-high heat. Add a splash of oil to ensure the beef does not stick, but not too much. Remove the beef from the marinade and place it in the hot pan. Season with flaky sea salt, then cook for 2-3 minutes on each side until medium-rare. Remove from the pan and leave to rest in a warm place for 5 minutes. If you have a meat thermometer, the internal temperature of the beef should reach 57C/135F. Slice the beef to a thickness of 5 mm (¼ inch).

Drizzle the rice dressing over the steamed rice. Using a rice paddle or wooden spoon, fluff the rice using a scoring gesture (this mixes the dressing through the rice while ensuring the rice grains are not crushed). Scoop the rice into the warmed bowls and gently smooth the surface. Do not press or compact the rice down.

Spread 1 tablespoon of the Taipei butter over the rice in each bowl, then using the back of a spoon, make a small indentation in the middle of each bowl. Layer the beef in a rose pattern around the indentation, then gently place a soy-cured egg yolk in the middle of each beef rose. Sprinkle with chilli flakes and some more flaky sea salt.

Spiced beef butter

We first encountered this at Lin Dong Fang and it sat tableside for those who wanted to turn their clear broth into a rich spicy broth. It remained with us all these years and we now serve this iteration on our rich beef noodles.

Makes: 100g

Ingredients:

¼ tsp red Sichaun peppercorns

1 dried red chilli

1 star anise

½ cinnamon stick

100g beef fat

⅛ spring onion (scallion), finely diced

1 clove garlic, finely diced

1cm (½in) piece of fresh ginger, peeled and finely diced

1 tsp doubanjiang (fermented chilli bean paste)

1½ tsp chilli powder

1 tsp premium soy sauce

Method:

Toast the Sichuan peppercorns, dried chilli, star anise and cinnamon stick in a dry frying pan over a medium heat until fragrant, then remove from the pan and lave to cool. Transfer the spices to a spice grinder or pestle and mortar and grind to a powder.

Melt the beef fat in a separate frying pan over a medium heat, add the spring onion (scallion), garlic and ginger and cook until they turn a light golden brown, then strain through a fine-mesh sieve into a heatproof bowl and discard the spring onion, garlic and ginger.

Return the fat to the pan, then add the ground toasted spices, the doubanjiang and chilli powder. Give the mixture a good stir over a medium heat, then remove from the heat and leave to infuse for two hours.

Strain the beef fat through a fine-mesh sieve into a bowl to remove any solids (if it has started to set, first melt it gently in the pan over a low heat). Stir in the premium soy sauce and use straight away.

Rice dressing

Super simple to prepare, you can make a big batch of this and use it whenever you feel like it.

Makes: 140ml

Ingredients:

100ml rice vinegar

20g salt

20g caster (superfine) sugar

Method:

In a small non-reactive bowl, whisk together all the ingredients until the salt and sugar have dissolved. Another easy way to do this is to put it into a jar, seal and give it a good shake. The dressing can be stored in an airtight container at room temperature for up to a month.

Soy-cured egg yolk

This cured egg yolk started off as a topping for the pig’s blood cake, but since then it has been a constant across all our menus. At first, when we opened a new restaurant, we tried to avoid using it, but then we thought, “Screw that!” and made cured egg yolk a mainstay in them all. There will never be a BAO restaurant without cured egg yolks, and therefore there will always be a group of angry chefs who have to painstakingly crack and separate the eggs daily. We have provided the method for making one cured egg yolk, but this can easily be scaled up depending on how many you need to make.

Makes: 1 soy-cured egg yolk

Ingredients:

50ml mirin

35ml light soy sauce

15ml dark soy sauce

1 egg yolk

Method:

Mix together all the liquid ingredients in a small bowl, then carefully lower in the egg yolk and leave to cure for 10 minutes.

Tip:

When preparing the egg yolk, make sure to remove all the egg white as well as the cloudy placenta. Hold the yolk gently in your fingers as you separate off the egg white and use the side of the index and middle finger to cut away the small chalaza as you do so.

Recipe from ‘BAO’ by Erchen Chang, Shing Tat Chung, Wai Ting Chung (published by Phaidon, £29.95).