Tomatoes have been great this summer! I don’t garden and I haven’t asked any of my farmer friends how the crop is but the ones I have eaten have been sweeter and juicier than I remember. One of my favorite things, a la Peter Luger’s in Brooklyn, is a rare steak served simply with some sliced tomatoes and sweet onion that’s been tossed in a little vinegar to take out the bite. It is a perfect and quick summer meal.
I felt like doing some experimentation this week. Summer has made me want nothing more than languid repose, so I thought that playing with a new ingredient may offer some jarring of the central nervous system. Maybe one ingredient would help create something so incredible that it would excite me out of stuporous malaise. So I bought some koji. Koji is kind of the national ferment of Japan. It’s rice that has been inoculated with the mold aspergillus oryzae. It’s a basic component of soy sauce, sake and miso and can be used to add umami and funk to all manner of dishes. There are endless recipes online for making shio koji and a plethora of ideas for using it in meat as a marinade or sauce. I wanted to use koji in the most basic form and simply ground the koji in a spice grinder then rubbed down a piece of boneless short rib. I placed it on a wire rack and left it uncovered in the refrigerator for 5 days.
This evening, I washed off the coarse powdered koji and dried my piece of beef very well. Many threads online seem to think that you can emulate the funkiness of dry aging in just a few days with koji. I don’t think that there are any shortcuts to beef that has been aged for months but I do know that the short ribs I had prepared had an intense, rich beefy smell that I often find reminiscent of buttered popcorn. It’s one of the nicest things I can say about a piece of beef - “it’s got that buttered popcorn thing”. One of the benefits I found when I cooked the beef is that the koji helps develop an incredible pellicle (a slightly tacky surface on a cut of meat caused by air circulation and water loss) that produces a fantastic Maillard reaction (fancy name for the amazing benefits of browning something really well). The beef browned beautifully and I slowly took it to medium rare before slicing thin. I then made a tomato salad with some shaved red onion, capers, roasted sweet Italian peppers and a few other pantry goods. I’d also been helping remodel Morgan’s house all day and wanted all the fat, so I toasted up some baguette and slathered it with foie gras butter. And here’s what I found. The tomatoes are incredible this summer. They are but I’m writing a newsletter for a butcher shop. The beef was browned better with little effort than most any steak I cook on a weekly basis. Also, the steak had an incredible funk, not quite blue cheese but not far off that was intense at the edges and lessened in the meatier portions. It was definitely much elevated from it’s fresh form. However, I didn’t find that the koji did a great deal to tenderize the portion of boneless short rib. I purposefully chose a rather tough cut to see what the outcome would be and was a little surprised that it retained a pleasant amount of chew. I don’t prize tenderness and was quite happy. However, you know what does tenderize a steak quite nicely - slicing it thinly across the grain - which I did here before plating.
So as I write this, gorged on steak and tomatoes and bread, I’m not exactly having a mountain top experience but I am excited to start experimenting a bit more. I’m beyond the days of kitchen adventures that require humidity control and special equipment and a notebook. The barrier for entry for experimentation can be as low as you like. Cooking something hot and fast one week then low and slow the next can be the experiment. If you have ideas, we have the meat to get you started. So please, come talk to us about all the esoteric recipes you’ve read or the one ingredient you’ve never felt comfortable using. We’ll try anything and tell you all about it. Enjoy your week friends.
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