Bringing a Supermarket Steak in the 600-Yen Range Closer to Restaurant Quality with "Salt Maitake" and Smarter Cooking: Meat Pro Hayato Morita's Home Steak Techniques

Morita's reason for recommending steak at home is rising prices. Whether you go to McDonald's or out for a gyudon, a meal now runs over 800 yen. In that case, Morita figures, you might as well cook a steak at home.

Morita adds that steakhouses aren't really doing anything that special. There is, however, one big difference: how they salt the meat. This time, Morita recreates the professional salting method at home while combining it with "salt maitake," a seasoning technique of Morita's own invention. It is a mixture of salt and maitake mushrooms, and Morita explains that coating the meat with it makes the meat tender.

Morita explained the changes that occur when salting meat by comparing it to placing something dry on something wet. When dry salt sits on the surface of the meat, moisture rises up from the meat. The salt dissolves in that water and becomes brine. This takes about 30 minutes after salting. From around the 30-minute mark, the brine starts moving back into the meat. If this continues for 24 hours, you get ham, according to Morita.

Based on this mechanism, Morita says steakhouses take one of two approaches. One is to salt the meat the day before and store it. The other is for when they can't predict when customers will arrive. Steakhouses and teppanyaki restaurants serve courses, and the main steak usually comes out 45 minutes or more after the meal begins. If the meat is salted during those 45 minutes, it is just right.

Morita listed three problems commonly seen in steak cooked at home, and made them the points to improve this time.

The first is salting right before cooking. Many people let it sit for about 10 minutes before cooking, but then the meat and salt don't come together, and the salt and meat taste separate. Morita stressed that if you salt it, you should let it sit for 45 minutes.

The second is bringing the meat to room temperature. Quite a few Italian and French chefs, and YouTubers who post steak-cooking videos, say it's fine to cook without bringing it to room temperature. While acknowledging their skills, Morita said that when it comes to meat, people should ideally ask a meat professional, and that the meat should be brought to room temperature.

The third is searing it all at once and finishing without touching it much. In Morita's view, it is better to flip it several times. Because distribution and technology have improved, meat now bleeds less, so flipping it several times lets the heat enter in waves.

In Italian and French cooking, steak is often paired with button mushrooms. But according to Morita, in umami rankings that include Japanese mushrooms, dried shiitake comes first, several types including maitake are nearly tied for second and third, and button mushrooms rank below them. Maitake has strong umami and aroma, as well as a strong tenderizing effect, so Morita decided to use it in both the sauce and the side dishes.

The only produce used is one cluster of maitake, carrots, and one Japanese leek, and Ryuji remarked that it was "pretty simple." The seasonings are beef tallow, soy sauce, lemon juice, vinegar, and umami seasoning (Ajinomoto). To finish, Morita adds a crystalline salt made by a friend on Awaji Island.

The first step is cutting the sinew. Professionals can tell by looking, but it's hard for ordinary people to locate the sinew, so Morita suggests poking the meat with a fork or a bladed tool to check. Any spot that makes a "gasu" or "ku" sound and feels hard when pierced is sinew, and should be cut generously. In this piece the sinew ran lengthwise, so it was cut crosswise to sever it. Morita says this one extra step alone makes a steak much tastier.

Next, remove the moisture. The moisture that comes out of the meat causes off-odors, so wrap it in paper towels and let it sit. The key is to wrap the large surfaces thoroughly, and even after a short time, the paper had soaked up a considerable amount of water.

To match the amount of meat, about one-third of a maitake cluster is used for the salt maitake, and the rest goes to the side dishes. The maitake is finely minced in a chopper, and salt equal to 1% of the meat's weight is added. Since the meat is 230g this time, that's about 2.3g. By Morita's rule of thumb, a pinch is about 1g, so that comes to about two pinches.

Steak is often seasoned with 0.7% salt, but this time Morita uses 1% to account for the salt absorbed by the maitake. Still, Morita also says not to worry too much, since steak is originally an American culture and people there eyeball it quite a bit. A fork is apparently the easiest tool for mixing in the salt.

After sitting a little while, the salt maitake also releases water. This is the same phenomenon as when salting meat, and the water is not used. Lay down plastic wrap, place half the salt maitake on one side of the meat, flip it, place the rest on top, and wrap it up. According to Morita, more maitake would make it even tastier, but even this amount has a "huge" effect.

When wrapping, Morita insisted on shaping the meat. Steak is a dish with thickness, and if you don't set its shape here, it will flatten out when cooked.

For the side dish, about two-thirds of the carrots being used are boiled for 20 minutes in water with a 2% salt concentration, per 1 liter of water. It's enough salt that Ryuji was surprised, saying, "That's quite a lot," and the idea is to set the flavor at the boiling stage. The carrots go in unpeeled. The reason was revealed later.

The leek is cut into lengths about the size of a finger, with a cut made about halfway through so heat can get in. About three pieces are plenty for the side dish, and the rest goes to the sauce.

The sauce uses the remaining carrot and leek. The carrot can be peeled with a peeler, or, if you don't mind, just rinsed with water. The leek has strong fibers, so cutting it lengthwise preserves its texture.

These go into a Bun Bun Chopper along with 10cc of olive oil, 5cc of soy sauce, 3cc of vinegar, a little lemon juice, and three shakes of umami seasoning, and are finely chopped. If you don't mind acidity, more vinegar is also tasty. Morita explained that, to match the aroma of the maitake, the sauce was made to be something like a dressing.

Ryuji reacted, "This is completely different from what I'd make," and Morita replied, "But I bet you'll like it." The point came up that men sometimes dislike sour flavors, but Morita thinks this balance works.

After about 20 minutes wrapped in salt maitake, according to Morita, the enzymes have worked their way in considerably and the meat has become tender. However, leaving it overnight is absolutely a no-go, as the meat's condition would deteriorate. The maitake on the surface is wiped off but saved for use in the sauce later.

Picking it up, Ryuji was surprised: "It's super soft." The meat had become floppy, yet no drip had come out. The sinew, however, stays tough to the end, so it is lightly stabbed with the tip of a knife.

The meat is cooked over medium heat, around 3 on the stove dial. Morita said this medium heat is extremely important and introduced a personal "equation for cooking time."

The cooking is divided into three "sectors." Cooking one side, flipping, and cooking the other side makes up one sector. After repeating this, the meat is wrapped in aluminum foil to rest, then cooked one final time to brown the surface. In total, it's cooked in three stages.

The time for each side in the first sector is determined by the meat's thickness. The baseline is 40 seconds per 1cm of thickness: for 2cm, each side gets 80 seconds; for 3cm, 120 seconds. This meat was about 1.5cm, so 60 seconds per side. Morita says a rough measurement of the thickness is fine.

Too much beef tallow burns the surface, so use no more than about one teaspoon. Once the tallow has melted in, add the meat and cook one side for 1 minute on medium heat. After a minute it had a nice brown color; the oil was swirled around, and the meat was flipped for another minute. The same process was repeated for one more sector. Thanks to the shaping done at the salt maitake stage, the cooked meat kept its thickness, and Ryuji was impressed: "It was so soft, but it's still totally thick." Morita said, "I'm honestly not doing anything."

There's a trick to the aluminum foil used for resting, too. People tend to lay out a sheet of foil about twice the size of the frying pan flat, but Morita says that's pointless because all the heat escapes downward. Crumpling it to trap air lets it retain heat like styrofoam. The edges were raised in case juices came out, and the meat rested inside.

After 20 minutes of boiling, a skewer slides right through the carrots. Here the reason for not peeling them becomes clear. Rolling them by hand makes the skin slip off completely, revealing glossy carrots. Ryuji was surprised: "Nobody knows this." Morita explains it as a time-saving technique for side dishes. The carrots are cut to about the size of a finger, and the maitake is torn roughly in half.

The side vegetables are steamed, not seared. The carrots, maitake, and leek are arranged in the frying pan, which still has the oil left from cooking the meat. The carrot boiling water is poured in by eye until the vegetables are just submerged, half a tablespoon of soy sauce is added, and it's left alone over medium heat. No salt is added; the salt in the boiling water and the soy sauce are enough. When the liquid cooks off, the sound changes to a crackling, which signals that it's done. Morita said the goal in particular was to make the leek surprisingly delicious.

Meanwhile, Ryuji warmed the plates. At Morita's restaurant, the plates are always warmed too.

The rested meat goes back into the frying pan, the juices that came out are poured over the top, and each side is cooked for 30 seconds. Since it's already well cooked through, this finishes it.

For the sauce, the salt maitake that had wrapped the meat goes back into the frying pan with the remaining meat juices, the same amount of the earlier sauce is added, and they're combined while warming over low heat. If you like acidity, you can use more sauce. The sliced meat had a beautiful rosé-colored cross-section, and Ryuji exclaimed, "Perfect." The vegetables and meat are plated, the sauce is poured over, and the Awaji Island salt is added on the side to complete the dish.

Tasting the meat, Ryuji laughed, "This is meat in the 600-yen range?" and rated the sauce, including the maitake aroma, as pretty much perfect.

What Morita was most confident about was the side dishes, especially the leek. Ryuji reacted, "Delicious. What is this?" The fibers remained, and it was sweet with an almost half-raw texture, yet had no bitterness or sharpness. According to Morita, it turned out that a steaming method that avoids doing anything extra and uses heat rising from the bottom up suits leeks best.

Eaten with the salt, Ryuji says, the salt pairs well because the cooking method has already made the meat itself delicious. The two also talked about how good the salt itself tasted. The carrots were simply boiled with no butter, but Ryuji was amazed: "This is insane." Morita feels that while people tend to use butter with steak, this is plenty if you can taste the ingredients themselves. Ryuji also took it that the 2% salt water was really doing its job. The maitake was well received too, and Morita added that the maitake aroma goes well with sake.

Ryuji piled on impressions: "I won't be able to eat steak out for a while," "No need for red wine or butter," and "Hardly any oil, either," saying their own understanding had been "still shallow." Morita says the higher the grade of meat, the tastier it gets, and with domestic Japanese beef it would probably be quite delicious. The side dishes as a whole served the role of a sauce, and Morita described the combination of meat and vegetables as a "marriage." Ryuji affectionately called Morita, who pursues things to this extent, a "pervert."

In the bonus talk after the main segment, the conversation turned to where salt maitake fits in. Morita explained that it does the same thing as marinating in shio koji, but because shio koji is acidic, it degrades the meat's condition, whereas maitake is alkaline, so the meat retains moisture and becomes fluffy.

The talk also touched on Chaliapin steak, which uses onion enzymes to tenderize meat. According to Morita, it was devised about 90 years ago by a chef at the Imperial Hotel (Morita searched their memory, saying, "I think it was someone named Tsutsui") for Chaliapin, who had bad teeth. Morita thinks it's delicious but outdated as a technique.

In response, Ryuji ventured, "Honestly, Chaliapin steak doesn't really get that tender, does it?" Ryuji has tried it many times and found it made hardly any difference even when changing the amount of onion or the marinating time. Ryuji's conclusion was that it tastes good because the aroma transfers, but the tenderizing effect is weak. Morita agreed that it has an effect but not a very strong one, and positioned the maitake method as "the modern Chaliapin steak."

Ryuji asked whether it might be better not to use this method on good meat. Morita's answer was that even good meat becomes more tender, and wagyu becomes even more tender too. However, this method works on the meat's moisture, not its fat. Since wagyu has a lot of fat, it doesn't work on those fatty parts.

As for quantities, Morita repeated to the very end that "rough is fine." Steak is originally an American culture, and they're rough about it too, Morita said with a laugh, wrapping up the conversation.