Oh boy, it’s cooking time again. This time I’m making the Yukihara style Chaliapan Steak Don from Shokugeki no Soma ep 7. Here is the recipe from the manga
So without further ado…
Here are the ingredients. Steak, onion, rice, salt, pepper, umeboshi (pickled plums), soy sauce, and some red wine. I chose a tenpranillo for this dish. Most people should be familiar with all of the ingredients except maybe the umeboshi. It was the first time I’d cooked with it, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect. The ones I got were very, very salty. Once I got past the salt they do have a pleasant taste.
You’re going to start by dicing your onion. The finer you get it, the better. Once you have the onion minced you want to put it on the steak, and then let it sit for half an hour or longer.
You make a bed of onion for it to rest on, and then pile the rest on top. You may have noticed from the picture of the ingredients, the steak is not a particularly great cut. It doesn’t have a lot of marbling. This is a dish that it’s almost recommended that you use a cheap cut of meat for. You simply beat it to death with a tenderizer, then let the onion enzymes further tenderize the meat. This dish came about when a famous Russian opera singer was visiting Japan in the 30′s, and he had a toothache. He requested that the steak be very tender, and thus the Chalaipan steak was born.
After you let it sit for awhile, you take the onions off and saute them until they are translucent. When they are done you want to take them out of the pan and then cook the steak in the pan.
Mm, doesn’t that look good. I’m sure everyone has their way to cook a steak, but I like to do it in a pan. 2 minutes on each side on high heat, then either finish it in the oven for another 4-8 minutes depending on how done you want it, or just do the same in the pan. A trick for getting a nice evenly cooked steak is to baste it with the butter/oil that you are cooking it in after you have finished searing one side.
Just about perfect. I think it could have used maybe another minute or so, but it was very delicious. With a thinner steak I don’t think you’d need to cut it before you put it on the rice, but I wanted to check to see how done it was lol.
Now for the plums. The plums are for mixing into the rice. I took the pits out of three plums, and scrapped as much of the fruit as I could off of the pit and then put it in the mortar with just a little bit of honey. The plums are very soft, and pureed very easily. I scraped all of that out into the bowl of rice that I was going to make the don with. I wasn’t really sure how much the plum would contribute to the dish, but it really was the thing that pushed it from being just good to being amazing,
The sauce was quite easy to make. After I finished cooking the steak, I took the onions and put them back in the pan and deglazed it with the red wine. Basically all the bits that had burnt on to the side of the pan got mixed back into the sauce which gives it an amazing flavor. You simply burn off the alcohol and let the mixture reduce. I didn’t have any potato starch, so I used just a little bit of corn starch to thicken the mixture.
And done! To plate the dish, you put the meat on the rice, then put the onions and sauce on top of that. In the anime, it looks like Souma didn’t put the onions back in when he made the sauce, but it really doesn’t matter. The only real difference is that you would have a nicer looking dish.
All the flavors really blended together well, but I was impressed with the plum. The saltiness really made me want to keep eating the dish, and I didn’t put it down until it was all gone. I did get a 2nd helping that didn’t have any of the plum, and it was just not as good.
So anyways, I hope you enjoyed this sort of instructional. This was fun to make, and turned out a lot better than I was expecting! One of the real joys about this dish is that all of the ingredients except for the plums can be really cheap. I would think an asian market might have the plums for cheaper than I paid, but you would have to look around a bit.
In the Star Wars extended universe there is a station that can do things like move entire suns and obviously you can use that as a weapon
and at some point somebody wants to destroy the galactic republics central world, coruscant, using that weapon, so they enter coordinates 0 0 0 and set it to fire and it promptly blows itself up because it’s really old and does not use the coordinate system where coruscant is the center, but uses one where the origin is itself
