Steak

dancurren

I got a pretty sweet gift today - 1 55 Oz prime grade Tomahawk, 2 - 23 Oz Porterhouse steaks and 2 - 8oz A5 grade Japanese Wagyu (Joshu Prefecture so technically not Kobe but the highest grade Japanese Wagyu). I remember reading somewhere that A5 Kobe should be cooked at a really low temperature over a long period of time for a steak that size.... anyone have any info on the best way to cook this beautiful piece of meat that realy belongs in a dirty magazine? Sous-vide? A quick char over charcoal?

Brandon_Byrd_40557

Cook it rare and sear it hard. I was lucky this week that high-end imported Japanese Wagyu ribeye was on sale at my local Japanese market. My issue was that the cuts were cut rather thin (roughly 1-1.5cm) and this made searing them a big problem. Yours look much, much thicker. I will say that even though my steak was super-thin, it was so incredibly rich I couldn't eat more than half of it. The big challenge with super-fatty Wagyu, in my opinion, is figuring out a dish in which that amount of fat makes sense and where you can portion the beef appropriately so that the dish makes sense as a whole. You really don't want to treat it as a steak in its own right (and, say, eat it with a baked potato or something). A "traditional" way to go would be to slice it paper-thin go shabu-shabu style, you won't have problems. But I wouldn't want to eat it like a straight-up steak. I thought I would, but once eating it... I just couldn't do it. Portion size is crucial. Serve a small amount, and serve it with a couple of garnishes or sauces that can stand up to the insanity that is true Japanese Wagyu. And keep your sauces strong.... so strong that you only need a drop or two to get you where you want to go. Obviously, you don't want the sauce taking center stage over such beautiful product.

And seriously... don't try to eat it like a regular steak., You don't want to eat all that fat at once. You might think you do, but you're probably wrong. I know I was.

For reference, this is what I had. Because it was so thin, I par-froze it and then seared it in a screaming-hot carbon steel pan (Darto!) and flipped it every 15 seconds. It was so thin that the middle was still medium-to-medium-well, but there wasn't another good way to do it (apart from sous vide and cryo-frying). Still, it was just too much. After two minutes of cooking, it was shallow-frying in its own fat.