Aged Steaks With Fish Sauce and Koji
Some things, like love or a delicious shrimp base , may not be rushed, but a lot can be brought closer. While nothing replaces an authentic dry-aged steak, there are two ingredients that food lovers swear will help you get close: koji and fish sauce.
The premise of each is the same: the enzymes in the ingredients break down the meat, improving both flavor and texture, rather than allowing the natural enzymes in the meat to do so slowly over time. The expected result is a denser and nuttier steak with more minds. Instead of dry aging, aging is a lie . Both labels make a lot of sense, but I wanted to see if one ingredient was a better liar than the other, so I bought some cheap steaks and ran a (delicious) experiment.
Just Koji Rice
Koji – aka “Aspergillus oryzae” is a mushroom most commonly used to ferment soy sauce, miso and sake. You can buy it on fuzzy grafted rice online or at your local Asian grocery store. When spread on meat, koji breaks down proteins and carbohydrates into sugars and amino acids, and also removes moisture, resulting in a more tender and tasty steak.
To use the delicious koji lie, Bon Appetit recommends chopping the rice in a blender (I used a food processor), rubbing it all over the meat and letting it hang in the fridge for a few days, so that’s what I did. When the steak cooled down, all the fluffy, tasty, meaty, somewhat nutty and pungent aroma filled the refrigerator. It was actually pretty nice. After three days, I washed off all the koji from the meat and blotted it dry.
The meat was slightly harder, noticeably darker, and still retained the nutty, meaty flavor. I seasoned it liberally with salt and then sautéed it in butter for a few minutes on each side.
It formed a pretty crust pretty quickly, and when I took a bite it couldn’t be denied that it was fragrant and tender.
However, unlike a marinade like this one, which is excellent, the meat didn’t taste like a different ingredient. It was just a meatier, slightly sweeter and more concentrated version of myself. While I wouldn’t say it tasted the same as a 50-day-aged rib, it tasted better than any other top fillet I’ve eaten before. In short: Koji is a pretty good liar.
Just fish sauce
The Fish Sauce Method – from Nathan Myhrvold’s Modern Kitchen at Home – takes a little longer than making koji, but is based on the same principles. Instead of letting the naturally occurring enzymes in the steak break down it on their own, the enzymes in the hot elixir help it. The recipe is simple: just brush the steak with fish sauce, seal it tightly with a plastic bag (I used my vacuum sealer) and wait three days. After this time, remove the steak from the bag, wrap it tightly in the cheesecloth and put it back in the refrigerator for another three days.
After completing these steps, I took out the steak from the bag. There was nothing to wipe or rinse off, and the meat was almost the same color as the koji steak, but the smell was slightly pungent and less nutty.
The steak also developed a pretty crust rather easily, but this one was much more golden in color.
The meat was tender, the taste was strong and meaty, and it was based on a flavor that I can only describe as “raw”. It was pretty intense, almost distracting, and I loved it . However, it lacked the nutty sweetness that I enjoyed when I ate the koji-aged steak. This inspired me to combine both methods.
Koji + fish sauce
As you’d expect, a combination of the two involved covering his koji, letting it hang for three days, then rinsing off the koji and covering it with fish sauce and leaving it hanging for another three days before wrapping it in a cheese cloth. in the refrigerator for the last three days. As you can see in the photo above – which this time is a piece of fillet because that was what they had when I returned for another steak – the meat darkened even more.
And as you can see in this photo, it also formed a nice crust when seared.
The taste was fantastic. It had an intense, almost aggressive meaty flavor that comes from the fish sauce, with the nutty sweetness that koji brings. This is what I expected, but experimentation doesn’t always go as I expected and I was very pleasantly surprised. This was by far my favorite option, but it took nine days, which is more than a week, which seems like a lot of time. If you want a shorter steak and can only use one enzyme helper, you should take a koji. Not only does it only take three days, it also produces a more balanced and nutty steak. (And it looks cool.)