Guests who eat at Matū and Matū Kai know that we cook our steaks Warm Red™ — the phrase we coined for our unique cooking approach — but they might not know why. Here’s the backstory.
The team at Matū had a combined 50 years cooking steaks before Matū was even a thought, driven by an obsession for chasing the perfect bite of steak. We have tried everything we can think of and traveled to Europe, Asia, and South America to learn everything we could.
Maybe the biggest lesson from all this cooking was the need to ensure the fat is rendered before the proteins begin to tighten. The science behind it is explained in Harold McMcGee’s book “On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen.”
Different types of cattle have different fat melting points. Our 100% grass-fed Wagyu beef has a fat melting point around 100 degrees, much lower than typical “prime” beef. Proteins start the tightening process around 122 degrees. The magic happens in between those two numbers.
Most people think of rare as 120-130 degrees. But in steakhouses we have been to, their “rare” is cool in the center, and much hotter near the edges. We developed our own 4-step cooking process (and no, we do not cook sous vide) to accomplish a consistent temperature throughout. It may look closest to rare, but its center will feel like a medium rare steak to the touch. Our steaks are neither rare nor medium-rare, so we coined the term “warm red.”
So while we will cook our steaks “a little more” if you’d like, we don’t recommend it. If you are curious to try it — you can do a side-by-side test. We have done just that, oh… maybe only a thousand times!
Happy Eating.
