Ground Beef Mapo Tofu Style

I love Szechuan cuisine! There is a nice Szechuan restaurant in Vienna (Meister Xiao – go for it if you are in Vienna!) a couple of minutes away from us and they are serving gorgeous dishes. One of my favourites is mapo tofu: ground beef or pork, silky tofu, black beans and abundant spicy oil made from chili, szechuan pepper and broad bean paste. It’s served with fluffy, delicious, steamed rice. Guess what? It did not fit in my macros 😉 but we had similar ingredients at home and developed the following cut-friendly recipe adding also some more veggies. Give it a try, if you love spicy flavours as we do!

This recipe makes approximately 4-6 portions, depending on your macros and needs. It’s quick and easy and can be prepared in batch.

Roast the ground beef with the lard in a big pan until brown and crispy. Add the small chopped eggplants and let them cook with the beef for a while until soft.  Add chopped mushrooms, frozen peas, the non-green part of the spring onions, gochu-jang (korean red pepper, substitute with more chilli  or similar if you can’t find it), black preserved beans and adjust the texture with water. It could be more or less than the value in our recipe: it should have a thick soup texture (at least, we like it that way ;-)). Season well with salt, szechuan pepper, garlic and chili.

We ate it as a one pot dish but if you have enough macros left you can of course add steamed riced or a cut-friendly cauliflower rice.

This recipe is a great way to get your protein in! Just 100g have almost 10g of high quality protein. It makes calculating portion size really easy: say you need 50g of protein per meal, so you only need 500g of this one pot stew to be completely covered.

Take care of the muscle protein synthesis of your beloved ones and share this recipe with them 😉 . Did you like the recipe or made some adjustments you would like to share? Leave me a like or comment below!