Macau’s savory meat-potato hash feels foreign and familiar

As the first European gateway to China, Macau became the center of Portugal’s massive maritime empire in the East. You can still taste the resulting mix of flavors.

Egg-custard tarts, salt cod with garlic, and baked duck rice often are on the menu, though so are galinha à Africana (African chicken), Chinese steamed pork buns and Indian coconut curry.

Now imagine that kind of cultural convergence all in one dish — minchi, a minced-meat hash for which every family has its own throw-it-together recipe. It usually includes potatoes and tomato paste brought by the Portuguese, common Chinese ingredients like rice vinegar and soy sauce, and even Worcestershire sauce from the British, who also used Macau as a base before founding Hong Kong across the Pearl River Estuary in 1841.

Stir-fried together with ground pork and a little brown sugar, the hash tastes savory and slightly sweet, and altogether comforting.

For the weeknight-friendly version in our book “Milk Street Tuesday Nights,” which limits recipes to 45 minutes or less, we shorten the cooking time by jumpstarting cubed potatoes in the microwave. After cooking the pork with most of the seasonings, we remove it from the pan to finish cooking the potatoes until they’re crispy.

We lighten what could be a heavy dish by adding grated ginger, which isn’t typically involved. Sometimes served with rice, minchi, like any hash, begs to be topped with a fried egg and a squeeze of Sriracha.

Most recipes with potatoes require turning on the oven or long cooking times, but we often jumpstart potatoes in the microwave for weeknight cooking.

Macanese Meat-and-Potato Hash (Minchi)

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