Hope everyone is surviving this isolating time. During it, I decided to experiment with braising! I served this with a nice helping of mashed potatoes.

Since braising usually involves wine, and I didn’t have any, I saw that I could use some inspiration from the ingredients I did have from Asian and Japanese cuisine to make this dish.

Ingredients (Sake braised beef):

• A tougher cut of beef
• Onion
• Garlic
• Ginger
• Sake
• Soy sauce
• Salt (to taste)
• Pepper (to taste)
• Oil or butter of your choice
• (Optional) Additional vegetables of choice
• (Optional) Chicken stock
• (Optional) Chili flakes or some other source of spiciness

Ingredients (Mashed potatoes):

• Potatoes
• Salt
• Pepper
• Milk (or some other dairy or dairy substitute of your choice)
• Butter

The amount of beef and other ingredients you need depends on the size of your pot and how hungry you (and anyone you’re serving) are. Just make sure you don’t have more than 1 layer of beef, and that even with your vegetables, your pot is not too crowded.

During my research and reading/listening to various chefs and publications, I learned that in order to braise, you first must sear your meat on all sides, and get some nice colour on it, while also producing fond on the bottom of your pot. So that’s what I did. Oiled my pot, seared my beef.

Then, I removed the meat from the pot in order to sauté my vegetables and aromatics. Today, this was onion, mushroom, garlic, chili flakes, and powdered ginger (currently lacking the real deal). After I was happy with my vegetables, it was time to deglaze the pot with sake and soy sauce, and scrape up the fond.

After this, I returned the beef to the pot, and added more to what would become the sauce/broth. I totally eyeballed it, but you probably want something like a 3:1 ratio of sake to soy sauce. For some extra liquid to cover the beef to about halfway, after I was happy with the amount of sake and soy sauce, I put in an arbitrary amount of chicken bouillon cube and water.

Now, just time to let it simmer, covered, until the beef is tender.

Here’s how it looked before I started simmering it:

While it simmered, I made mashed potatoes.

Pretty simple. Just boiled some potatoes (skin on) until I thought I could mash them, drained the water, mashed them with a fork, added butter, milk, salt, and pepper and mixed until I liked it.

After about maybe an hour or so, the beef should be tender. I simmered it a little bit with the cover off to let the broth thicken more, and then served on top of my mashed potatoes.

Enjoy!