Yakiniku

Yakiniku

 

Grilled meat with a delightful sauce—our favourite as a family. We were introduced to it by Chef Mora when we first arrived in Canada, and with his family restaurant sold and COVID forcing us to eat indoors, I decided to make my own.

 

Here I share my recreation of this traditional dish, which I hope everyone can enjoy.

 

Yaki means grilled—in a pan, on a BBQ, or on an indoor grill, and niku means meat—beef.

 

While this meat is traditionally dipped in the sauce, I prefer to serve it already well coated. The choice is yours.

Yakiniku 

Serves 4

 600 g/ 1.5 lb  - thick rib eye steak, thinly sliced 

3 tsp sesame oil

3 tsp sesame seeds -some of it ground up

The Sauce

3 tbsp mirin 

1/3 cup soya sauce

3 tbsp brown sugar 

2 cloves garlic

3 tbsp orange juice

Toss the meat with a teaspoon of sesame oil. Keep it aside until ready to cook.

Boil together the ingredients for the sauce. Keep the flame low and allow it to simmer until the sauce is sticky and thick enough to coat the back of the spoon.

If you have ground sesame, add it to the sauce once cooked.

Remove the garlic before serving.

Allow to cool until just warm.

 

Cook the steak until it's medium rare, but don't overcook it. Coat each piece of meat with the sauce, sprinkle with sesame seeds and green onions, and serve immediately.

 

Tips

 

Serve this on its own or with sticky rice, plain boiled rice, or garlic rice.

 

Japanese cuisine uses different varieties of sugar for preparing its foods. Interestingly, rock sugar, or saakur, is often preferred to prepare their sauces.

Pure cane sugar is also a part of the series of brown sugars recommended.

 

To successfully thinly slice the steak, the meat must be semi frozen. It is the tiny ice crystals that hold the meat together and allow us to carve it neatly. Alternately, ask your butcher to slice it on his meat slicer.

Japanese cuisine flavours their food with orange rather than lemon that most other cuisines use to add the acid component. Their choice is generally an orange called the Yuzu. 

When  green lime is required they use the sour Sudachi a Japanese variety of locally grown lime. 

Photo courtesy Niloufer Mavalvala

My published cookbooks are available for sale through myself and on amazon.

The World of Parsi Cooking: Food Across Borders is a 3 award winning book. It has been self published in July 2019 and will be going into its second print in 2022. 

The Art of Parsi Cooking; reviving an ancient cuisine was published in 2016 by Austin Macauley and continues to be available through amazon book depot book depository and from the publishers.