Misa's Kitchen: 牛肉のたたき

Tataki is a type of Japanese cooking technique; roast only outside of fish or meat to give a nice combination of roasted aroma and fresh raw meat taste together.
You can imagine this is like a Japanese style carpaccio, mixed with the rare roast beef. But it’s more cooked than them because the meat is marinated in a sweet lemon and soy sauce.
Tataki looks as something special, but actually it's quite easy to do.
This is great match to sake as a nibbles, also this can be served as main dish with steamed rice.
I do this with just a regular roast beef meat chunk from any regular supermarket, but you can also do this with good sirloin steaks chunk; of course the taste gets even better along with the price, but not that much difference like when you use them for stakes.

Ingredients (for 2 people as main, or 4 people as starter)

500g beef for roast beef
2 bunch of spring onions (US: green onions)
1 lemon juice (it was 50 ml)
90ml water
30ml soy sauce
2Tbsp sugar
vegetable oil as you need

Methods
1. Slice all spring onions; thinner the better when you mix them with the sauce.
2. Clean meat. Take off the meat from the roasting net and discard the fat (you don't want this), then easily rinse the meat under running water.
3. If you look at the meat, you will see some lines between chunk of meats; basically the roast beef chunk which supper market usually sales comes with few tendon layer within it. Some parts just can separate by pulling off, some can't. Using a good sharp knife, cut out the chunks of meat along with those tendons.
4. Trim all tendons out from beef. If the chunks are still large, then cut along with beef meat string direction and make them into about 4cm thick/up to 6cm width chunks (Imagine, you will slice the meat diagonal to the meat strings direction at the end, and the slice will be 4x6cm rectangular shape).

* I don't discard those trims, cut them into very small bits and that's what I love to use for Sigureni recipe from Azlin this week.

5. Next prepare the sauce. Put water, soy sauce, sugar in a small sauce pan, put on a medium low heat and melt all sugar.
6. Squeeze the lemon, pour the juice into your serving dish. Once the above sauce is cooled down, then pour 2/3 of the sauce in to the same serving dish. (you want to keep the lemon still strong at this point.)

7. Start cooking the beef. Spread a little vegetable oil thinly on a non-stick fry pan, put that on high heat until the smoke start to come out. Place all meat chunks on the fry pan, fry all sides of meat until all sides get cooked easily. This will keep the nice juice of the meat inside the chunk.

8. Turn down the heat to medium then cook the 4 side of chunks that you can see the meat string line until it gets dark blown. When the meat is ready, you can feel the surface is enough hard, you can wobble the chunk to feel the center is not fully cooked, but the shape of chunk remain hard. It takes about 15 minutes.
9. Put the meat on a clean cutting board. Unlike the roast beef, you don't need to wait too long, just few minutes until it cool down to the temperature you can handle.

10. Slice them diagonal to the meat string lines, as thin as you can (about 2mm) then immediately put them into the serving dish where you prepared the lemon sauce earlier. Put all sliced spring onions then mix them well. Leave it for 10 minutes, until those sliced beef become completely cool.