From The In-Laws: Beef! — As Seen In Japan

Eriko’s parents like to send us packages, often with food inside. Here we will explore our latest package, and the goodies contained therein.

This week’s box contained, among other things, two packages of fancy beef!

300 grams is a good amount for a dinner for two, so we had two evenings of delicious beef. As the self-elected meat chef, I took care of the cooking. This time we got some small slices, normally good for yakiniku, and check out the marbling:

Nice cuts of steak in Japan often come with a little cube of lard, which is used to grease the pan instead of oil or butter. The lard works great to add flavor and get the pan nice and hot for a good sear.

This is how I normally cook Kobe beef, but it’s also why this round didn’t work so well. I’m used to using the lard for a big chunk of Kobe beef, where there’s a lot of surface area and it takes a long time to cook. But with these small pieces, the pan was too greasy, and as a result, the meat was a bit greasy when done.

It’s something I hadn’t thought about, but which was abundantly clear once I was done. Even with the greasiness, the beef had a perfect balance of fat and was very flavorful.

I was glad I had some rice to go with it. The first night ended up being very filling because it was so overwhelmingly greasy. For night 2, I corrected my mistake by not using the lard. As I said before, these small pieces are great for yakiniku, but since we couldn’t use fire, I tried again with the frying pan and simply used a tiny amount of olive oil to avoid sticking. The results were MUCH better.

Wasn’t as filling, tasted cleaner, and overall made for a great meal. Not my best effort, as I’m still getting used to these tiny pieces of steak, but pretty good nonetheless.

But that’s not all we got from the in-laws last week. Join us in the future as we explore some sweets they sent us!