Tea Bone Steak

Most people who know me knows I love tea. Now you know too. I appreciate tea not the way Kevin Rose imbibes his tea (feel free to read his tea resources though). The San Fransciscan way simply isn’t for me. No, me, I prefer something more traditional, and way less of the American bastardization of what tea is (case in point: Starbucks chai…most wtf drink ever). I list among my favorites, longjing (龙井), puer (普洱), and when available, piluochun (碧螺春) rather than just generic “green tea”.

Now, amongst the three of those, I have most plentiful stock in longjing, and I drink it every day. Longjing is also very versatile. Asides from plain drinking, I once accidentally discovered it to be awesome to be used in cooking (I accidentally dropped some loose leaves into a salmon steak while marinating it once – putting it into the oven was awesome).

So, this morning, I took out a T-bone steak to defrost. It was a rather old meat. Not old in that it has past its use-by date, but old in the sense that the fridge doesn’t do a good job freezing the meat. As such, the meat looked stale. It probably wouldn’t taste good if I just cooked it thus. The solution is simple – marinate the meat!

And so, I made a glass of longjing in the manner horse drinks from a bucket¹ (I made a pint-glass full). I waited till the color of the tea was far darker than what I usually would drink, then I poured the tea into the meat.

Here was my mistake – the tea was still hot when I poured it down, so it actually cooked my steak when the tea was poured in. This seals off a little of the meat from the tea getting inside. Pour cold tea in the future.

Also, I poured in the tea leaves with the meat, as to let the leaves soak. The leaves can be eaten, so its all right. I left it for 6 hours sitting in the tea.

Fast forward to 6 hours later. I had shown up at uni 2 hours earlier today, because I printed the revised timetable earlier. And I was tired, and hungry. Time to eat lunch. Steak it is! How to cook?

1. Take a pan, turn up the heat to very high, add oil (some people prefer macadamia nut oil, which goes very well with T-bones)
2. Wait for pan to heat up.
3. Add meat
4. Cook to your liking.

Under “Cook to your liking”, I also brushed on some finishing touches to the meat to ensure that it would be nicely caramalized. My secret is to use mirin – yeah, that Japanese rice wine sauce. I brushed on some mirin, and then let it cook in the pan.

I’m not a person who really likes the taste of meat² (hence I marinated the meat first). Meat scares me a lot. Blood makes me faint. So, I left it in to cook for some time, and by  the time it was done, it was pretty well done, and quite caramalized on both sides.

Here’s what it looks like served with rocket salad:

How does it taste like? Well, for one, like steak. But as I bit into the meat, the juicy parts came out, and it was, to my pleasant surprise, tea-flavored. You can see from the picture above there are some burnt tea leaves  on the plate. They taste not bad too. And you can only do these with the freshest of green tea leaves.

On second thoughts though, the rocket salad wasn’t such a good idea. Rocket tends to be overpowering in flavor. And fresh rocket is obviously stronger in taste than fried tea.

All in all though, I liked this. And the best part was, it didn’t break the bank. Go to Coles on Thursday nights

Try it, and tell me what you think. And oh, the rest of the post this week will be Battlestar Galactica related, in a countdown to Daybreak part II.

1. traditional chinese saying: if you drink from a tiny chinese teacup, you’re savoring the taste of tea; if you drink from a medium teacup, you’re thirsty; if you drink from a large cup (the standard american size teacup is a large cup), you’re a horse drinking out of the through [↩]
2. I cannot really appreciate meat like many people do. Steaks to me, no matter how they’re presented or what cut they are… they’re the same to me (with the exception of wagyu). Its still chargrilled or pan cooked or oven baked. What makes the difference to me is how it is prepared – marinades are important to my tastebuds [↩]