Yimen Smoked Beef 义门熏牛肉
Yimen Smoked Beef is featured among the local specialties of Anhui.
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Yimen Smoked Beef (义门熏牛肉) is a speciality of Yimen town (义门镇) in Guoyang County (涡阳县), Bozhou (亳州), Anhui: beef that is cured for days, steamed for hours and finally passed through oil.
How it is made
A 2019 feature by the Bozhou Evening News (亳州晚报) follows one Yimen maker, Quan Changfu. He chooses the shin of yellow cattle (黄牛), cures it for three or four days in a large vat with a seasoning mix he keeps secret, washes it, then steams it in a large pot for more than three hours. Before cooking, the beef has to soak and cure for a period. The last step is passing the cooked beef through oil.
Flavour and texture
The finished beef is described as neatly shaped and bright red, savoury and fragrant, with the seasoning running right through, easy to chew and so tender it falls apart in the mouth.
Where it comes from
The feature presents the beef as a family craft. Quan, then 50, had been in the smoked-beef trade for more than thirty years, and his formula passed from his grandfather to his father and then to him; he describes keeping the family signboard as keeping the ancestral skill.
The product travels well beyond the town. Some is vacuum-packed and some is made and sold on the spot, the maker takes it to trade fairs, and he says it sells across the country, while many buyers drive to Yimen specially to buy it.
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Wuwei smoked pressed duck 无为板鸭 →
Another Anhui smoked-meat speciality named after its home town, made from duck rather than beef.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-23. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.