Grilled beef that simply melts in the mouth
A Japanese chef unlocks the secrets to locking in the flavor of a wagyu cut
Wagyu, one of the world’s most sought-after meats, often comes in the form of a steak. Chef Kinase Takashi is now using a traditional Japanese grilling method to cook the meat produced by the breed of cattle native to Japan.
This is taking place in a newly opened restaurant called Midorikawa Siyan in the Sanlitun area of Beijing.
Midorikawa Siyan is a sister restaurant of the longtime popular sushi restaurant Midorikawa, but the newcomer features Japanese grilling in a style called kappo, meaning a more refined and interactive eating experience where you can chat with the chefs and watch meals being prepared right in front you. My recent visit to Midorikawa Siyan made for an incredibly satisfying bit of grilled wagyu, and discovering the secret of Japanese grilling in an interactive dining experience with Takashi as the showman and instructor.
“An enjoyable way to eat wagyu is to cook it on a grill fueled by binchotan,” Takashi says, pointing to the Japanese charcoal of that name that emanates from oak. “This is the best fuel for grilling.”
Binchotan burns cleanly without smoke and at a high steady heat exceeding 800 C.
“The burning binchotan quickly seals in the meat’s moisture, enhancing the flavor in a way that other charcoals can’t,” Takashi says.
He has developed this method since when he became a chef 30 years ago, he says, and it takes him about 30 minutes to cook a 250g, 2 cm thick wagyu sirloin cut.
A smidgen of rock salt is sprinkled onto the meat during grilling, he said.
The grilling itself is undertaken with meticulous care. I watched Takashi first cook the sirloin for one or two minutes and then remove it from the grill to allow it to rest for several minutes. Then he returned it to the grill and continued cooking it, and repeated this process four more times.
While grilling, he adjusted the heat of the charcoal manually, constantly waving a fan over the meat.
When the cut of meat was finally taken off the grill he wrapped it in foil.
“This helps it hold the juices as well as its heat,” he says.
At the same time, the internal temperature of the core of the meat after cooking should be somewhere between 56 C and 58 C.
The meat is served in slices, with rock salt or fresh wasabi as the dipping sauce. As I bit, I was taken aback by how fine the texture was, exceeding any wagyu steaks I had had before. The flesh was extraordinarily tender, melting on the tongue in a velvety rather than greasy way and delighting the taste buds. It was so juicy as to be mouth-filling, bursting with full-bodied delectable fattiness.
If you have a lot of the binchotan seared wagyu in thick slices by themselves you may find it all rather rich and fatty.
Balance the beefy flavor with rice. For a sukiyaki donburi, Takashi cuts a paper-thin slice of wagyu of about 2 mm and cooks it in a traditional Japanese way using suet to grease the sukiyaki pot first, and dipping in raw egg before serving.
Apart from wagyu, the chawanmushi (Japanese steamed egg custard) with foie gras and St. George’s Mushrooms salad were also delightful.