Abstract: Beef dishes refer to instant food cooked with beef as raw materials. The beef is degraded by high temperature treatment to produce heterocyclic amine,which has a certain carcinogenic and mutagenicity. The formation mechanism of two kinds of heterocyclic amines,the influential factors of the formation of heterocyclic amines,the preprocessing and common detection methods of heterocyclic amines in beef dishes were studied in this paper. The inhibition methods of heterocyclic amines were studied by the addition of exogenous substances to influence the precursors of heterocyclic amines. This paper could provide a reference for the control of heterocyclic amines in the cooking process of beef dishes.