Vietnamese Shaking Beef (Bò Lúc Lắc) is an easy and delicious one-pan meal that is excellent for everyday meals as well as special occasions. This dish features tender and flavorful beef plated on a bed of greens and fresh tomatoes.
The name of this dish in the US. comes from the way it is cooked. The cook adds beef to a hot pan and then shakes the pan constantly to cook/sear and move the meat around. It is a one-pan meal that can be put on the table in 30 minutes.
This Southern Vietnamese dish is a popular menu item in a lot of restaurants in the US. I think it is even more popular in the US than in Vietnam. I wouldn’t rank shaking beef in the top 50 popular foods in Saigon. In Vietnam, it is often served with rice or fries.
The dish tastes best with well-marbled beef steak. I like to use ribeye after trimming off excess fat because it’s very flavorful. You can pick other good quality cuts of beef steak that you like.
Is This Recipe Authentic?
While I always aim to share the most authentic flavors in my Vietnamese recipes, reflecting how they taste in Vietnam, this recipe is not 100% authentic. Traditional shaking beef usually has seared beef cubes, onions, and bell peppers tossed with a sweet-savory sauce. Besides soy sauce and oyster sauce, the sauce often includes ketchup which has a rather sharp (and a bit artificial) taste, which doesn’t pair well with premium beef in my opinion.
If you want to make authentic shaking beef, click over to my Vietnamese beef pasta (nui xao bo) recipe and use the stir-fry sauce in that recipe instead. For this recipe, I use rice vinegar and a bit of sugar to balance the taste instead of using ketchup.
Essential Tips
Most home kitchens don’t have high-power stove like those at restaurants. Therefore, it is harder to make bo luc lac by using a wok in which we can shake the beef around since a traditional wok works best on a powerful gas stove.
So when you make this dish at home, it is best to use a heavy-bottomed pan like a Lodge cast iron pan to get a good sear and finish cooking quickly although these pans would be too heavy to shake…
Make sure to heat your cast iron pan until it is very hot. If the pan is not hot enough, we can’t get a nice sear, and we would be steaming the beef instead, and when we add the sauce, the dish will become soupy.
It takes less than five minutes to cook the dish. Anything longer than that, you may overcook the meat. We want to aim for medium doneness for the beef. Therefore, have all ingredients ready before you start cooking.
Note: the post was originally posted on March 16th, 2018. It has been updated with new photos and revised instructions in April, 2024.
⭐️ I’d love to hear what you think about the dish, so please feel free to leave a comment and a rating if you have tried it. New recipes are added every week so let’s connect on Facebook, Youtube, Pinterest and Instagram for the latest updates. You can find my collection of Vietnamese recipes here.
Old photos