In Hiroko’s American Kitchen you can find a recipe – Sake Braised Short-ribs. This is one of my favorite dishes in the book. In this recipe I modified some of the ingredients and cooking techniques used in an American style Braised Short-ribs. By doing so, the end dish has clean and lean flavor, but is equally rich and delicious.
Ingredient modification: I replace mirepoix with kelp. Kelp has much higher and cleaner umami flavor, which contribute to the dish greatly. Cooking technique modification: I blanch the browned meat in boiling water before braising it. This produces clean and lean flavor in the prepared dishes. Again, rich beef flavor in the dish is preserved in resulting dish.
Here is a video of cleaning the browned short-ribs before braising in my kitchen. After blanching 8 to 9 pieces of short-ribs, you can see in the photos that water look very filthy. The water is full of off flavors, including bitterness and astringency, and fat. [vimeo id=”76983726″]
One tip of browning meat: I use cast iron skillet for this job. Since the meat is marinated after each batch of meat I brown, I clean the bottom of the skillet with a paper towel before adding another batch to the skillet. In this way the following batch of meat is not covered with burnt bits. This process also makes the cleaning of the skillet easier.
Here I have posted the photo of upgraded Sake Braised Short-ribs. I created this dish for a dinner project in Bogota, Columbia. I serve the steak with sauce made from corn. Columbian corn is amazingly delicious, so this is a perfect match.