Langan Braised Beef 栏杆牛肉
Langan Braised Beef is featured among the local specialties of Anhui.
Langan Braised Beef (栏杆牛肉) is beef slow-cooked in a spiced master stock in Langan (栏杆), an old town about 50 kilometres north-east of Suzhou (宿州) in northern Anhui, where the city paper Fuxiao Daily (拂晓报) calls the beef the town's best-known product.
How it is made
The beef comes from yellow cattle of the Huang-Huai plain, three to four years old. It passes through a series of steps: slaughtering, soaking, rubbing, washing, rinsing, braising in the stock and airing. The stock is seasoned with more than 30 spices and an aged master stock whose recipe is kept secret.
At the home of Chen Jicai (陈计财), an inheritor of the Langan beef craft, the stock is simmered from 50 jin (about 25 kilograms) of beef bones and spices in a pot 1.2 metres across, and two to three hundred jin of beef in large pieces go in at once for six hours. The fire must be fruitwood, and the beef is lifted out twice during cooking and pierced so the stock soaks through. A 300-jin batch comes out weighing less than 170 jin.
Flavour and texture
The meat is fragrant and tender without being greasy. Sliced, it keeps the fibre of the beef but is seasoned all the way through, and the tendon is springy without being hard to chew.
Where it comes from
Fuxiao Daily says a cooked braised beef has been famous in Langan since the Tang dynasty. The Xiao county (萧县) writer Wang Xiaojia (汪晓佳) recalls childhood visits to relatives in Langan, where braised beef was always on the table and the relatives bought more for the family to take home; beef sold in Caocun (曹村), closer to his own home, tasted clearly different.
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Guzhen Laorenqiao Beef 固镇老任桥牛肉 →
Another northern Anhui beef named after its town, Laorenqiao (老人桥) in Guzhen (固镇) county, useful for comparing how each town prepares its beef.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and fact-checked against them on 2026-09-23. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.