As I recently posted, I finally had my first taste of Japanese A5 beef, and it was mind shattering. Unfortunately, I am me, which means I need more. Unfortunately, I am me, which means I can't fucking afford to spend fifty fucking dollars for an ounce of beef, no matter how damn amazing it is. 
So, like I said in that post, I'm going to figure out some way to approximate it with something that costs a bit less if it kills me, and, honestly, it probably will. 
So I went to Kroger and found the cheapest hunk of cow per ounce that I could, which happened to be bottom round roast at $8.95/lb, or fifty-five cents per ounce. For those counting at home, that's a 99% price save on the A5 at a restaurant in Orlando. Obviously you'll spend less buying the fancy shit at a store or paying wholesale, but I can only operate with the prices I have available.
I cut the roast into 7 slabs about half an inch thick and had a couple extra pieces left over, too, so that comes out to 8 servings for me, which means 4 attempts at alchemy.
For the first attempt, I started off by lightly scoring both sides of the meat. I didn't press down at all, just let the weight of the blade cut into the meat just a touch. X's across both sides, plus a little extra on that spot of extra thick fat in the middle, and we were ready to go.
I seasoned it with some salt and black pepper, then stuck it in a casserole dish lined with foil. So far so good.
Then I covered it with a metal bread pan. It made sense in my head, okay? My thought process was that I wanted the beef to cook slow, so I kept it from getting the heat from below with the pyrex and foil, a little insulation, you know? The pan on top was to get some radiant heat from above. I set my oven to bake at 200F and left that in there for about 45-50 minutes.
To go with this, I sautéed up some crushed and sliced garlic with some diced red bell pepper and mixed that in with some jasmine rice and extra virgin olive oil. This is a super quick and easy side that I've been eating the hell out of lately. Just pick your veggies, sauté them up with some butter, cook a pot of rice, pour a little extra virgin olive oil into the rice, dump in the veggies, then mix it all up. I added in some black pepper, too, because it's great shit.
My second side was some red onion and quartered mushrooms caramelized in butter and red wine with some salt and pepper. I let that simmer for a while since the beef was taking forfuckingever.
When the beef seemed like it had been in there long enough, I started up a pan on high heat. Sorry for the blurry pic there; I was doing shit, alright? Doesn't look super appetizing, but it's cooked, and that's important, right?
I tossed in some butter, which immediately filled my entire kitchen with smoke, but I stuck with it. I got the beef in quick, seared it, and got it out quick before I burned the kitchen down.
I put the rice on my plate with the 3" PVC like normal because what I lack in creativity I make up for with being boring as fuck. I laid as much of an intact red onion down and laid out some mushroom quarters around it to look pretty and shit, then slung a piece of shit slab of beef into the empty section.
I call it a piece of shit slab of beef because it was overcooked to hell. Ever eaten a dry pot roast? Probably not, because if you're cooking a pot roast, you've got liquid in that shit. This was a dry slab of goddamn pot roast and was an embarrassment to cows the world over. Aside from the flavor, which was tolerable, this was a failed experiment. The veggies were fucking fire, though, so not a total loss. I also drizzled a little of the red wine reduction over the beef to make it edible. After all, this is the ODG kitchen: we eat our failures so we remember not to fuck it up again next time.
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