Yakiniku (Japanese Table-Grilled Beef)

Variations

• Shio yakiniku: no tare at all, just salt, sesame oil and lemon. The choice for leaner cuts, for tongue, and for good beef — salt does not cover the meat.
• Horumonyaki: built on offal — intestine, tripe, heart. It looks like a separate menu but is closer to the original form of the dish (see the history note below). Open the offal out flat, let the fat render off and grill it hot and briefly.
• Buta yakiniku: pork belly and shoulder. Pork has to be cooked through, so cut it thicker than beef and give it longer. A tablespoon of miso in the tare suits it.
• Jingisukan: Hokkaido's grilled lamb, on its own domed grate with onion and cabbage. A cousin rather than a variation.
• Yakiniku-don: leftover meat tossed briefly in tare and piled on rice — the standard next-day lunch.
• At home: a cast-iron grill pan, or a grate over a portable gas burner. It smokes a lot, so opening a window and running the extractor flat out is part of the preparation, not an afterthought. A non-stick pan will not survive this temperature.

Tips

• The tare is a dip, not a marinade. This is the biggest difference from bulgogi, which is steeped in pear, soy and sugar so the seasoning goes right through the meat. Yakiniku is mostly grilled unseasoned and dipped afterwards, which is why a yakiniku plate arrives as raw red beef (what marinades do). The same logic runs through the tare/shio split at a yakitori counter.
• The grilling order exists because of sugar. Put tare-marinated meat on first and the sugar burns to a black crust on the grate, and everything after it tastes bitter. Salted, then plain, then tare, then offal.
• Thickness sets the time. 2–3mm wants 20–30 seconds a side; 1.5cm wants 90. That is nearly a factor of ten, and mixed on one plate there is no way to judge it.
• Heat the grate fully first. Under-heated, the meat sticks, and where it sticks the juices run out and you are boiling rather than searing (heat control).
• Only the thick cuts get to rest. Two minutes on the plate settles the juices in skirt. Thin karubi has no resting time — it finishes cooking on the way to the plate (cooking meat and resting).
• Shabu-shabu is the same table and the opposite heat. Shabu-shabu cooks in water, so the fat melts into the broth and nothing browns. Yakiniku cooks in dry heat, so the fat drips and flares and the surfaces brown. Both are cooked a little at a time at the table, and they build completely different flavours (dry heat and moist heat).
• The spring onion salad and the seaweed soup are not garnish. Sharpness and broth between mouthfuls of fatty meat are what let you keep eating, which is why the supporting cast at yakiniku restaurants is so consistent.
• The history, accurately: yakiniku is not an old Japanese dish. It took shape after the war in Korean-run restaurants in Osaka and Tokyo, and the name spread in the 1960s and 70s. Horumon is the offal Japanese butchers were discarding at the time, which is why offal sits at the origin of the dish rather than off to one side. Beef import liberalisation in 1991 and the spread of smokeless grates through the 1990s made it what it is now. Its roots are tangled with Korean grilled meat, and the dish is easier to explain with that left in.