60-Day Butter Aged Wagyu

i know you all love wagyu and boy oh boy do i have something special today i always feel bad talking about it for so long and just making you wait i kind of just want to drag it right on screen right now and show you but what i have today is truly something special i was lucky enough to visit hokkaido japan several years ago the food there was the best i've ever had anywhere in the world and what's exciting to me is that the piece of wagyu we have today comes directly from hokkaido japan it's about 10 pounds and it is special what we have here is an a5 japanese wagyu hokkaido strip loin and this thing is pretty big but what's really amazing to me is that marbling that you can already see through the plastic without even taking it off i mean just spinning it around to the other side and letting you look at how beautiful this thing is i myself can't help but start to salivate it the thought of eating this to portion it off you'd slice it across this way getting nice cuts just like this what i'm holding right here is about a thousand dollars retail and you can imagine you'd pay a heck of a lot more in a restaurant for something like this too as with all my wagyu and my medium rarish series i get it from the wagyu shop that sends me this from japan again i'm not paid to tell you about this at all actually i'm literally just telling you where i'm sourcing my wagyu and the truth is buying a nice piece in bulk like this is a heck of a lot better than buying small pieces in my opinion that is if you're actually going to be able to eat this much perhaps even more exciting than the actual wagyu itself is what we're gonna do with it today well i shouldn't say today because it's gonna take two months sixty days we're gonna butter age it and we're gonna do that of course by making homemade butter and allowing it to rest in the fridge for those 60 days to really develop more flavor then we'll come back sear it up and talk about what it tastes like so let's make that butter now butter is very simple to make all you're doing is adding a bunch of heavy cream or heavy whipping cream into a big mixer until it reaches whipped cream and actually goes past that stage because we actually need so much butter here i'm going to do this in two separate stages so to start i'm simply going to close this down and let it go so it's going to eventually reach this whipped cream phase where it starts to actually obviously turn into regular whipped cream right but we want to actually take it a step past that so as you watch here it's going to slowly start to sort of curdle a little bit and we're going to get to a point where we've over whipped it basically where we've turned it in sort of curves and wet so in watching this you're actually watching two processes one is how to make butter the other actually how to make buttermilk you're gonna start to see it turn a little bit yellow and that's gonna be when we begin to get our butter and then our buttermilk seeping out of that butter we're sort of agitating it just over mixing it and as it spins it gets more and more and more yellow in here and then it'll start spraying me because that buttermilk is essentially the consistency of water and will splat all over the place and at this point here we finally reached the butter stage but we'll continue mixing for just a second to let it clump up even more and as you can see now we have our butter and our buttermilk very very separated and if i reach in here and just grab a big clump of that butter you can see how simple that is and i can tell you right now if you were to just eat this with a little bit of salt in there it'd be the best butter you've ever had after quite some time we finally got in our second round of butter here and we're gonna wait until it's all clumped up around the whisk attachment and then i'll lift it back and you can see there that all the butter is clumped up around this one area now our next step is to press out the remaining buttermilk now the main thing we're doing at this point in the process is spanking our butter and i'm not kidding when i say that you basically want to spank out all of the bottom up so i'm going to do is move a little bit by bit at a time in batches over to our finalized butter bowl right here and when i do this i'm just going to press it out really well with my hands and with my wooden spoon here and each time i pick up some of this butter and squeeze it you're gonna see that a bunch of buttermilk still drips out of it and our goal here is to get out all of that buttermilk i'm gonna knead my butter now like i would a piece of bread spanking it and pressing out all of that buttermilk butter what what have you done things are getting weird up in here once that butter is done we're gonna get a nice piece of parchment and lay the butter down across the parchment paper this of course is the step in the process we're gonna be coating this entire piece of beef in that amazing butter first i'll flatten it out on the bottom and make a nice wall on the bottom for that meat to rest then once it's got a nice space to rest on i'll flip this upside down and smack it down we can't forget to take off this piece of paper that soaks up all that moisture on the meat then we're simply going to wrap up the sides and smooth that butter all the way around this beef this seriously looks so cool and it's definitely one of the more unique things i've done in this kitchen so i'm happy to have you here watching and experimenting on this with me i mean think about how cool it is that you get to hang out right alongside me for all these culinary adventures it's an absolute pleasure to have you we'll continue pressing all this butter making sure it's flush up against this beef until there's a thick and even coating almost like frosting i mean it would make sense that the butter looks like buttercream frosting especially because buttercream is made from butter once this is all coated we place this in the fridge for 60 days i might look a little different by then so i'll see you when i see ya now we've waited 60 days and i know you want me to take that rock you out of the fridge and i'm gonna run over there and do it right now in fact i can't wait but one really fast thing before i do that please go right down and toss a little like on the video i'll explain more why later but it helps so so much so i'm gonna just give you a quick second and tap that like button you all set if so let me grab that wagyu the time has finally come we've been waiting 60 days for this this right here is a 60-day butter aged wagyu and again it's crazy how much time has passed i mean we've been waiting for this thing for so incredibly long you can see that that butter is almost cracking a little bit of those beautiful red juices are flowing through this thing down here i see a hole where it's dripped out and on the other side i can see that some of it has actually caked up here eat it eat it or you're fired but there's one thing that i've been waiting to do for very long and unfortunately i have to do it off camera cut the cameras for a second i gotta slap it i said cut the camera to start i'm gonna peel all that wrap off the bottom of our wagon this thing is extraordinarily slippery to start i want to slice it right down the middle to not keep you waiting and i can't even use my special old fancy japanese knife no i'm going to use this bad boy so to start i'm going to slice right down the center of this wagyu i'm going to be honest it's harder to cut through than wagyu normally is and frankly that's no shocker to me i'm sure that the butter aging has made it quite tough inside at some parts but i'll push and ease that knife all the way through to cut this clean off interestingly enough i'm hearing some rather strange crunching sounds from here and the smell is actually quite pungent but it looks like we've chopped through it so without further ado let's open this bad boy wow look at that now it's time to take off that butter so i'm going to start by seeing what i can actually just peel off by myself because really this butter is just a great big crust as you can see some of these pieces i can just take off in massive clumps you can definitely try to save the butter if you want although it does probably get a bunch of that mold that you may not necessarily want to eat so i'll let you make that decision yourself i'll flip this piece around and peel off this massive piece on the top too it's actually quite nice that it comes off this easily but when it starts to get really funky and cool is when you look at the top of the meat as you can see clearly it aged in from the outside which is what we expect and when i eventually flip it over this whole top here is a funky color and we're going to want to carve some of this off i'm going to peel off this last section here noticing that pattern that we get on that homemade butter as well as some of those weird colors that we get clearly that have come right off this meat and then we have our first hunk of butter aged meat which if you look carefully and if we compare this to the start when this wasn't coated in butter and hadn't been aged clearly it's a different color for now i'm gonna set this aside and bring this other piece in doing the same exact process to this one here once that second piece is done it's time to trim it off like i said we need to take off those bits on the bottom that you see there mainly really just trim down this part because we don't want to eat this and find any other rancid bits that are going to be a little bit too mouldy or blue cheesy or exotic for us to taste i'll start with the easiest section here by trimming off a nice little bit from the bottom and when you see this don't worry none of this is going to go to waste because we can reduce down a bunch of this fat and use it for anything else it's more just that we don't want to eat any meat that's kind of gone bad before i go further take a good hard look at that marbling that's something that you can never see anywhere else this is japanese wagyu at its finest now i definitely still see some bits right here so i'm going to come down with my knife and cut off this corner right here again you can hopefully tell that this isn't necessarily something you want to eat now we definitely want to follow the edge when we trim here because we have some color up along the side so i'll start at an angle with my knife and come right around the edge of our piece of wagyu it looks here as if i want to trim just a little bit more off but at that point it looks nice and clean here now in terms of the fat cap that probably did a pretty good job protecting the meat over those two months but i am just gonna trim just a little bit of this off regardless i don't need that much fat anyways and now for these corners and edges that still look a little bit off we're just going to go ahead and do some finishing touches and now that i've finished trimming i want to show you what it looks like with the final loss all piled next to it obviously some of these pieces have gone way too far and these i may toss away others however are definitely perfectly okay to render off the fat and who doesn't love some wagyu fat on just about anything now as for this beautiful bad boy it still leaves us with plenty of beef to work with and this is only the half of it so let's do the same with that other piece while we wait for that wagyu in the fridge for just a moment so it can firm up again before we cut it because as you know wacky was a lot of fat i'm going to start with a little bit of vinegar into our boiling water which helps so that the whites of the eggs don't run if they crack open while boiling and then i have a nice selection of beautiful farm fresh eggs that i'm going to slowly drop into our boiling water one at a time so that they don't crack i'm sure many people already know this but a nice soft boiled egg yolk goes really really well with a good old piece of wagyu or regular steak it looks like we already got our example for a running yoke but as you can see it doesn't go all over the place it sticks to the egg that's what the vinegar does for now these eggs are gonna go for about six minutes and nine seconds and i know it's a silly time but i showed you the same thing in my ramen video and did that not turn out perfectly while those eggs are going let's make a quick ice bath which will prepare us for the moment they're done because this is a time sensitive thing soft boiled eggs are no joke people at this point we're ready to take out those eggs so drop them immediately into that ice bath you know funnily enough i stole these eggs from my roommate and usually he's the one selling food from me so it was really nice to see a change in the dynamic for this time around like i said that vinegar trick works pretty well huh at this point let those ace cool down for a while as long as they've halted cooking we're good now it looks like we're ready to cut into these bad boys i'm going to set this first one aside because the way i want to cook this is the way i like to cook wagyu most of the time and nice cubes first i'm going to go ahead and slice down right through the middle of this piece this will give us two nice hunks of wagyu which give an absolutely stunning shot and i have to say it looks a tad bit are you laughing you're actually fired like i don't touch it don't touch that and now i'm gonna cut it into nice cubes making absolutely sure that they're all very similar in size to me there's just no better way to cook wagyu than cutting it into nice perfect cubes because it allows you to have really nice control over every single piece you're cooking and now once they're all cut into nice cubes i'm gonna hit it with a little bit of my flaky salt which again we're gonna have available in limited quantities really soon and then i'll roll these cubes all the way around in that salt salt is the only thing we need to use when seasoning this wagyu all that butter age flavor is going to really speak for itself and there's no need to ruin that by putting all sorts of seasoning because this wagyu it has the seasoning they almost now look like we've covered them in sour patch kid dust but they're ready to cook and now i'll crank up the heat on my carbon steel pan and if i want to i can very lightly kiss it with some of that wagyu fat that we tossed aside and then we sear our wagyu cubes and once we've achieved that beautiful golden brown crust we'll flip them over now we'll leave these again for a few minutes on this side until they're complete now these are done cooking because they are butter aged i do want to add a little bit of butter to these just to bring everything back together given what we did i always like thinking about this sort of thing with food and this after all is butter aged wagyu so why not add a little bit of butter back into it once you've finished cooking it we don't want it to lose touch with where it came from who doesn't love a little bit of butter painting pour nope at this point we can crack open those eggs and hope that we nailed that perfect softball leg but trust me if you follow the six minute nine second rule you killed it you simply crushed it but either way this is always gonna be a moment of truth so let's cut open into this bad boy and appreciate that delicious yolky runniness oh baby now it's time at this point to cut open one of these beautiful cubes but first listen we absolutely killed the crust on this wagyu but more importantly when i open it up we have that nice red wagyu which we do not want to cook any more than this and you can tell that it's extremely juicy with a nice crust on it now i can't really help myself so i'm going to cut in and take a bite right now holy crap i'm going to feed you this piece of wagyu and if you eat it you're not fired to close things out i want to sprinkle on a little bit of black flaky salt over each egg just to get some really nice color and seasoning on there and then i want to plunge that beef right into that egg really mixing it all together for one big delicious wagyu bite that right there i can tell you right now simply cannot be beat and i haven't even tasted it yet now i know i've already talked a little bit about the flavor but i do want to quickly say right now that that bite was something genuinely and truly special let's try it again it's from shirt honestly i don't even know how to react that age wagyu has developed a flavor unlike anything i can describe it's got these deeper richer more developed notes in it with all those same amazing qualities in wagyu for instance you still have that drippy delicious fat coming off each piece of meat i mean if you don't believe me just tell me what that is each bite is an explosion of flavor coating your entire mouth and that amazing fat and the great part about this fatty wagyu is that it's so well marbled that as that flavor melts and goes around your mouth it travels through every possible taste bud and gives you every bit of all of that flavor that to me is the coolest part now it'd be nice if i can compare butter age with regular wagyu in this instance but what i can tell you is this the same way you see those changes on the wagyu and you taste them all very clearly the way i describe it is like this age wagyu is far richer than regular wagyu in the sense that if given two pieces you would want to have a little bit less of that h wagon the same way that if you sat a piece of wagyu next to a piece of regular steak you'd want to have a little bit less wagyu it's just too rich too much of a treat what i will say is this was a very fun experiment and i hope to do more like this what do you want me to age next my hands are all oily and i've got some wagyu to finish but i want to say thank you for watching please again toss a like on the video it helps us so incredibly much and the amount of time and effort and energy that goes into these videos is a lot and it adds up really really fast consider all the food all the dishes all the filming and all the editing and all we ask from you is a simple like on the video again i appreciate it in the meantime lots of fun videos coming up as always so make sure you smack that subscribe button and if you're not part of that notifications gang yet you're really missing out again i got some more raggedy so i'll see you later you

Channel: Nick DiGiovanni

Views: 4,044,454

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Id: KBTVfOn9tG4

Length: 14min 33sec (873 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 26 2021