The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [120]
Now, with only an hour remaining before dinner, I telephoned Mr. Nishi’s beeper. A Japanese meat broker working in New York, Mr. Nishi returned my call almost immediately from his car phone as he crossed the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan. In Japanese steak houses, he told me, Wagyu is either grilled over wood charcoal or panfried, nine ounces of meat for each person, often cooked medium-well, and served with vegetables and rice. It is crucial to achieve a good brown crust on the meat.
My favorite way of grilling a really thick steak—I adapted it years ago from one of Christopher Idone’s cookbooks—seemed ideal, so I cut all the external fat from my Wagyu; divided it crosswise into two thick steaks (for purposes of experimentation); salted them a few minutes before cooking so that some juices would come to the surface, where they would caramelize nicely; popped them briefly under a very hot broiler until the outside was crusty but not charred; transferred the Wagyu to a 350-degree oven, where the insides would finish cooking; took their temperature every few minutes with my instant-read meat thermometer; removed one steak when it had reached 120 degrees for rare and the other at 140 degrees for medium-well; lightly peppered them; and let them rest for ten minutes. I called my wife to the table, cut each steak in two, and we began to eat.
The rare steak was tough, and its marbling fat had not melted into the flesh; its taste hinted at a sweet richness but was not strong enough to matter. The medium-well steak was fibrous, mealy, and nearly inedible.
Either I had ruined a king’s ransom in Wagyu, or Wagyu is a cruel and evil hoax. I had to know the truth. We took a plane to Hong Kong, boarded a ship for Japan, and two weeks later landed in Osaka. (This is a ludicrous route to Osaka, but my wife had business on the way.) We chose Osaka because its inhabitants are famous for dining to what the Japanese call kui-daore, or “surfeited collapse,” which coincides with my own aspirations, and also because Kimio Ito, the generous brother of a Japanese friend in New York, was ready to treat us to the best Wagyu feast in town, at a restaurant called Devon Steak.
We entered past a cooler piled high with slabs of beef even more thoroughly marbled than my Wagyu back home, sat in a booth around an immense stainless-steel griddle, and ordered a raw beef appetizer, a beef main course, beer, sake, and melon ice cream. While we ate the velvety rectangles of raw Wagyu (they tasted more like raw tuna than beef), followed by a grainy version of vichyssoise, a salad of iceberg lettuce, and a heavenly little baked Hokkaido potato, the chef stood at the open end of the booth and cooked our steak.
He buttered the griddle, layered cubes of fat and peeled garlic cloves on it, placed a massive rib eye, three inches thick, on top of them, and covered everything with a copper dome for a minute or two, apparently to melt the fat and infuse the beef with the lightest garlic perfume. The cover was lifted, the garlic and fat were scraped to one side, and the beef was doused with cognac and allowed to luxuriate for a minute or two more, again under its copper dome.
Then the cooking began in earnest. With visible concentration, the chef sliced off every bit of surface fat and separated the cap from the body of the rib eye, putting everything but the very heart of the beef to one side. He asked Kimio, who asked us how we liked our beef—we divided between rare and medium-rare—and then he lightly salted the meat, rotated it on the griddle to caramelize every side, and ground a fine sprinkling of pepper over it. Several times the meat was cut in two, the cut sides were browned, and one half was moved to the warm edge of the griddle while the chef attended to the other.
Finally, most of the beef lay resting at the side while he worked on four small pieces of steak, each two inches by one inch by one-half. He frequently tested their internal condition by pressing them with a chopstick, and when he felt