(Urara speaking in Japanese)
(dramatic music)
(Ikumi speaking in Japanese) (crowd gasps)
(Urara speaking in Japanese)
(Shigeno speaking in Japanese)
(all speaking in Japanese)
- [Alvin] Hello there!
Welcome back to another episode of "Anime with Alvin."
Today, I'm gonna be making
the A5 Wagyu beef roti don from "Food Wars."
What I have before me is a beautiful,
2.5-inch-thick A5 Wagyu ribeye,
a steak with some of the most beautiful marbling
I've ever seen but also a price tag that I have never seen.
This is like one of those
four-dollar-sign restaurants on Yelp.
I normally wouldn't be as aggressive
when trimming a precious steak like this,
but I am trying to achieve
those perfect slices shown in the anime,
so even though this hurts my heart a little bit,
I gotta do what I gotta do.
But that is a cool cross section right there.
To season, I'm just giving the beef
a generous amount of salt on all sides.
I gotta say, though, it's quite an honor
to be able to work with this kind of beef,
so I'm making sure that none of the scraps go to waste.
I wanna have a lot of fun making roast potatoes, stir fries,
and especially burgers with all of these trimmings.
To cook these steaks, I'm placing them
in a ripping-hot pan with no oil.
There's so much fat in this beef that renders out
during cooking that that is going to serve as the oil.
I'm looking for a nice golden-brown crust on this beef,
letting the steaks crisp and brown up in their own fat.
It's like being on a nude beach.
You wanna make sure you get a nice brown color
on all sides, even your bottom.
Once the beef has a nice full-body tan,
I'm removing the steaks and then cleaning out the pan.
In the show, it is shown
that these A5 steaks are butter basted,
which honestly, in my opinion, is a bit overkill.
But we are aiming for show accuracy,
so we are gonna do as the butter do.
Does.
This is butter basting, a technique commonly seen
in restaurants and YouTube videos.
Hot butter is spooned continuously
over the tops of the steaks
again and again and again, often in slow motion
to visually enhance the sexual appeal of cooking.
And boy, it does work, I'll tell you what.
In the show, one of the characters is seen
to be touching a meat thermometer to the bottom lip,
accurately reading the internal temperature
of the beef as 65 degrees Celsius,
which is around 150 degrees Fahrenheit.
Even though to me that is way too high to be cooking steak,
we're gonna go for show accuracy
and throw these in the oven until it hits that mark.
In the wise words of legendary rapper Eminem,
something's wrong, I can feel it.
We're gonna continue and make fried rice
while the steak rests.
To prep for our garlic fried rice,
I'm starting by thinly slicing garlic cloves
into very, very, very small chips.
These should fry up nice and fragrantly with our rice.
After that, I'm just mincing some parsley pretty finely.
That's it. Prep is done.
I wanna cook the garlic chips in a wok with the butter
and the beef tallow from frying the steaks earlier.
Once the garlic chips are a nice golden brown,
I'm tossing in daled rice.
It has been dried out on a tray until nice and separate.
Giving this wok the best of a toss that I can,
I'm hoping to coat each grain of rice
with the fat and the flavor from the butter,
the beef fat, and the garlic.
For seasoning, I'm just using some salt.
And to finish, the minced parsley from earlier.
Honestly, I wouldn't really call this a garlic fried rice.
This is just more of a garlic rice dish.
I have this uncle who really likes fried rice,
and I wouldn't wanna piss him off now, would I?
After a few more tosses in the wok
and trying to separate the grains as much as possible,
this garlic rice is now ready to plate.
Now that the steaks are rested, it's time to slice it up.
I'm cutting these slices pretty thin
because I'm hoping to get a nice fanned-out rose pattern,
as seen in the anime.
And while cutting this,
my intuition from before was correct.
This is a little overcooked for my taste.
It is probably on the medium-well side,
which is a crime for this kind of beef.
That being said, it does look pretty good, though.
After arranging the slices on top of the rice
in a nice fanned-out rose pattern to the best of my ability,
I present to you my first attempt at the A5 Wagyu roti don.
I don't think there was any doubt
that this does taste amazing.
It's so rich, it's so fatty,
and it goes quite well with the rice,
even though the rice is very rich as well.
But honestly, I think I can do a lot better.
Luckily for me, I was able to convince the Babish team
to let me try again.
So we're gonna run it back.
What I have here is an A5 Miyazaki Wagyu ribeye,
which is even better than the first one.
The marbling looks like snow.
After cutting this into sizable strips
and trimming off the excess scraps,
which I will be taking home,
I'm cooking the steak this time to a nice medium-rare,
about 120 degrees Fahrenheit,
and searing it only in its own fat in the pan, no oven.
This is how I personally cook it,
if I were making this for my friends.
Those would be some lucky friends.
And after slicing and carefully admiring
and plating the ribeye, I present to you
attempt number two of the A5 Wagyu roti don,
complete with a little rose of beef right on top.
I was very pleased with the plating of this one,
so I decided to take it out into the sunlight
and watch this beautiful bowl of beef glisten
like jewels in the palm of my hand.
Man, that's nice.
A quick deposit to the memory bank, and it's time to eat.
This is rich, almost too rich.
Honestly, I think Wagyu can be a bit overrated sometimes,
especially when it's served so vulnerably.
I wish there was something acidic or refreshing
to help with the fattiness.
But it's a good thing I'm not the only one here.
Kendall and Steve have been working really hard,
from finding really high-quality Wagyu not once but twice
to shooting and editing this episode beautifully.
This bowl of beef and rice is as much theirs as it is mine.
You'll have to excuse us.
We're gonna go take a nap now.
(mellow music)