Today, I made Beef Tataki. This is something that we usually see in my family around this time of year. It is easy. Put some salt and pepper on a block of beef. Leave it for 30 minutes or so. First, grill garlic and shallot in a pan (well, of course, you need to put some oil). Take them out. Then, grill the prepared beef quickly in the same pan but until lightly browned everywhere surface. Then put it into an iced water. Wipe it with kitchen papers and put it into a dish with sliced onion, lemon and cooked garlic.
In one hour or so, slice the beef and you can have it with soy sauce and wasabi. My special dressing is this: soy sauce, sugar, Japanese sake, a little bit of brandy, lemon juice, mashed garlic, mashed ginger and mashed onions. I usually mix them in a pan and heat it up so that all alcohol goes away. Then, cool it and put some cut-chives. Add Tianmianjiang if you like a bit of Chinese flavour in it.
I usually cook Roast Beef if I am not in Japan, instead of Beef Tataki. My understanding is that the difference between the two is that in the case of Roast Beef, even inside of meat is "cooked" in a sense that heat reaches there. In terms of Tataki, inside is very rare. Germs (sorry to talk about it, but important) get on surface of meat, usually. So the idea is to kill them by heat, in the case of Tataki, although as I have a small child, I cook it around "rare steak." There was a big scandal in Japan about providing raw meat in a restaurant and now the regulation is very strict.
