This bag of potato starch has been in my cupboard for about a year and a half. I know that because I bought it after seeing it used in a recipe for beef negimaki (scallions wrapped in seared beef and dressed with a soy-mirin-sake sauce) in the November 2004 issue of Saveur. Our Spring Cleaning day seemed the perfect opportunity to finally make use of it. There's a recipe similar to Saveur's over at Epicurious, one of the main differences being that Epicurious's sauce is thickened by reduction while Saveur's is thickened with the potato starch. In doing the latter, I was really impressed with how the two teaspoons of potato starch diluted in five teaspoons of cold water created beautifully thick glaze in a matter of seconds when I added it to the barely boiling soy, mirin and sake. There were no lumps, as I often find with corn starch, and no added flavors it seemed. There's a picture after the jump.
[Photos: Nick Vagnoni]
In the end, I took Saveur's suggestion of rib eye over Epicurious's flank steak, but seared the negimaki in a pan, as Epicurious suggested. I don't think there's any need to blanch the scallions either. Also, after chilling, thinly slicing and pounding the beef under some plastic wrap, I layered the strips side by side, overlapping them slightly, and pounded them again to create long sheets of steak about 1/16th of an inch thick. From there, I rolled up the green scallion tips like a sushi roll. I seared them on all sides in some vegetable oil, added some of the unthickened sauce to the pan, and then basted with the thickened sauce. It was delicious and really fun, but also a fair amount of work for what was essentially a snack for two or three people.
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