Beef Balls 牛肉丸
Beef Balls is featured among the local specialties of Guangdong.
Beef Balls (牛肉丸) are springy balls of pounded beef from Shantou (汕头), Guangdong, where the local version is known as Shantou beef balls. The making technique, under the name Chaoshan hand-beaten beef ball making (潮汕手打牛肉丸制作技艺), is on Guangdong's provincial intangible cultural heritage list, and Shantou lists its own hand-beaten technique on the city's heritage list.
How it is made
Shantou beef balls are made from the hind leg of the cow. The authentic Shantou beef ball uses pure lean hind-leg meat, while beef tendon balls (牛筋丸) use hind-leg meat with the sinew not fully trimmed. By hand, the meat is beaten five to six thousand times, and the craft combines pounding, stirring, slapping and squeezing the paste into balls. Makers vary the beating time, the proportions, the water and the moment the salt goes in, and each gives a different bite.
Guangdong has a provincial food safety standard for Shantou beef balls. Shantou beef balls are sorted by the water in the paste into soft (also called fine), medium and hard types, by ingredient into plain beef and tendon balls, and by method into hand-beaten and machine-made.
Flavour and texture
Shantou beef balls are known for a texture described in four words: soft, moist, fresh and crisp. A good ball is crunchy and elastic to bite. According to Chen Zhibin (陈志斌), a third-generation heritage bearer of the Shantou technique, that springiness comes from the salt-soluble proteins in fresh beef, which the beating draws out.
Where it comes from
Nanfang Daily traces the hand-beating method to daozhen (捣珍), a palace dish of more than 2,000 years ago. Beef balls grew out of Hakka pork balls, and the first sellers in Shantou were mostly Hakka hawkers who carried their wares through the streets on shoulder poles. At night small boats with a lamp at the bow worked the Han River (韩江) there, selling beef ball soup as a late-night snack to Hakka cargo boats moored nearby. In the 1940s, among the many food stalls around Xinxing Street (新兴街), the balls made by Luo Jinzhang (罗锦章) were the best known.
How it is eaten
Because many people in Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta have family roots in the Chaoshan area, the balls are popular there too. In Hong Kong they are a common item in winter hotpot and are also served with soup noodles, flat rice noodles (河粉) or rice vermicelli.
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.