The Easiest Panda Express Beijing Beef Copycat

In case you’re unfamiliar with the original Beijing beef from Panda Express, it’s an Americanized Chinese dish consisting of fried beef strips, bell peppers, onion, and a sweet and tangy sauce. My take aims to lighten up the sauce and swap the fried beef for lean ground beef.

For a quick nutrition facts comparison, a 5.6 oz serving of the original Beijing beef has 470 calories, 13g of protein, 46g of carbs, and 26g of fat. A 7 oz serving of my Beijing ground beef, on the other hand, has 250 calories, 23g of protein, 18g of carbs, and just 8g of fat.

Using ground beef also means you won’t need to marinate, coat, and fry the beef. Instead, you can have this dish on the table in about 30 minutes with only one pan to clean.

How to Make Beijing Ground Beef

I’ve included a visual recipe walkthrough below with ingredient substitution notes, cooking tips, and serving ideas. If you’d like to get straight to cooking, you can skip down to the recipe card at the bottom of the post.

Ingredients for Beijing Beef

You’ll obviously need a pound of lean ground beef in addition to a small yellow onion, red bell pepper, and a tablespoon of olive oil. And that’s it aside from the sauce.

Here’s everything you’ll need for a Beijing beef sauce copycat:

• hoisin
• sweet chili sauce
• sugar free ketchup (I like G Hughes)
• oyster sauce
• low sodium soy sauce
• apple cider or rice vinegar
• garlic powder and red pepper flakes
• beef bone broth

The sauce is sweet, tangy, and umami. It might look like a lot of sauces, but the good news is that you can probably substitute if you’re short on one or two ingredients. While hoisin is sweeter, if you have some gochujang around from my spicy ground beef and quinoa bowls, that would still give you some fermented soy bean flavor and a bit of sweetness.

You can use any beef broth, but using a high quality bone broth makes the dish noticeably richer. You also get a little protein boost. For this Beijing beef, I used the same Austin-based Kettle & Fire that I used in my chicken birria recipe.

Final note: If you have all the sauce ingredients, you have pretty much everything to make other one-pan favorites in my Thai basil ground chicken and five spice ground beef and eggs.

Cooking the Bell Pepper and Onion

You want the bell pepper to slightly soften and the onion to pick up a tiny bit of color around the edges. The veggies in the original Beijing Beef from Panda Express have some bite to them. So you don’t want to soften them too much.

Cooking the Ground Beef

Once you’ve cooked the veggies and transferred them from the pan, add the ground beef to the same pan. You want to get some browning on the beef via the Maillard reaction, so I like to press the ground beef flat to create more surface area. After you have some browning on the beef, break it up with a spatula and fully cook before adding the sauce.

Adding the Beijing Sauce and Cooked Veggies

You’ll need to reduce the sauce before adding the veggies back to the skillet. If your Beijing beef sauce is taking longer than expected to reduce, turn up the heat a bit. It shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes or so.

Once the sauce leaves a trail behind a spatula, you can remove from the heat and add the bell pepper and onion back to the skillet. Stir everything together and you’re finished. Get ready to serve!

Serving Your Beijing Ground Beef

I like to serve with sliced green onion, sesame seeds, and a side of steamed white or brown rice. For a lower carb option, you could serve with steamed cauliflower rice or a blend of both like in my Teriyaki ground beef stir fry.

And don’t forget one of my favorite sides—air fried cauliflower rice. Trader Joe’s riced cauliflower stir fry makes life easy. Just throw it in the air fryer for 20-25 minutes at 400ºF, stirring occasionally, while you cook your Beijing beef. If you don’t have access to a Trader Joe’s my air fryer fried cauliflower rice recipe has instructions for making with plain cauliflower rice and frozen vegetables.

You could also make some copycat Panda Express chow mein, chicken egg rolls, or Panda Express super greens.

However you end up serving your Beijing ground beef, I hope you enjoy! If you love this recipe, I always appreciate recipe reviews or feedback of any kind in the comments. And if you have a question about this Beijing beef recipe I missed, drop it in the comments as well.