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Breaking beef, part 4

Well, I was down to my last few pieces of round roast, and I felt like I had been making surprisingly good progress so far, so maybe tonight would be the night to work some fucking magic. My biggest takeaway from experiment three was that I needed to break the meat down a little bit more. I know that I could do it with an acidic marinade, but that shit would fuck with my flavor, and if there's one thing I didn't want to do after last time, it was to fucking with the flavor. 
 So what are my other options? I could cover it in egg whites before cooking it to help hold in moisture and keep it tender while cooking, but that's not really what's causing my issues. The same goes for cornstarch or baking soda. It wasn't moisture loss that was causing my issues, though. I needed to get the insides broken down, get the muscle fibers to chill the fuck out. So to start with, I decided to stab the shit out of the meat with a fork.
Next, I threw the meat into a sandwich bag with a cup and a half of warm water mixed with about a quarter cup of salt. The brine bath helped to start the seasoning process, but it also causes the muscle fibers to start swelling and breaking apart from one another. I left the meat in the brine for 2 hours. It was a late dinner. That ended up fucking me.
I could tell a definite difference in the texture of the meat from just 2 hours in brine. My metal skewer for the butter holes just fucking slid through the meat, like stabbing a marshmallow. I was feeling confident about the steak, so while I was waiting for it to cook, I decided to get fancy with my side, so, real quick, I...
...dry toasted some panko bread crumbs in a pan on the stovetop, then I...
...diced up some mushrooms and a radish.
I also fried some thinly sliced garlic cloves in some sesame oil. A small pan, some sesame oil on low heat, and just kept the garlic cooking until it started getting brown and crispy.
I got to use one of the coffee filters I bought a while ago for once. It was fun. Anyway, I used that to drain most of the sesame oil off of the garlic. I then used a paper towel to finish drying off the garlic chips and moved on.
I dumped the garlic-infused sesame oil back into my pan and used it to fry an egg yolk. It ended up with the bottom pretty gooey and mostly solid but the top still pretty runny. Well, runny inside the still intact membrane because I FUCKING KILLED IT on this one. I basted the top with hot sesame oil to keep it a little thicker so I wouldn't accidentally break it pulling it out and it worked like a charm.
So yeah, while all this fun shit was going on, I did boil up some rice, then mixed in some rice vinegar and mirin so I could make a veggie roll. I laid some rice out onto a seaweed sheet, dumped all of the toasted panko over it, then dumped the mushroom on one side and radish on the other. I finished by drizzling some Japanese barbecue sauce all over it.
Then I rolled it up and cut it into pieces, as one does. I did overstuff it a bit, so it didn't hold together too awfully well, but I'd rather have too much than too little, you know? When the beef was done in the oven, I seared it with butter again like last time, then sliced it up.
Plating was a little fun tonight. I stuck four of the veggie rolls over on one side of my bowl and laid the egg yolk over the center of that, then I stacked the meat around the other side rather haphazardly, then dropped some garlic chips on top.
Unfortunately, because it was late and I was hungry, I ran the oven a little hotter than I should have, so the meat was a little overcooked for me. Still about as tender as experiment three despite the high temp, so I still think I'm on the right track with the brine bath and butter holes. When I get some more beef, I can give this another shot and maybe not fuck it up. The garlic chips went great with the beef, though, adding a nice crunchy burst of flavor to the tender and tasty meat. The egg yolk was also just a touch overcooked for me, but I was able to spread it across the top of three of the veggie roll slices (I had the first one without just to see how it was, and the answer is that it fucking rocked). As good as the roll was, the yolk really elevated it so much that it forced me to use the word "elevate" to describe my food. So, overall, I call this a successful experiment (and run of experiments), and I'm looking forward to continuing on with this shit in a week or two.
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