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After going on a business trip to Vietnam and tasting dog food there, my husband has begged me for the past 3 weeks to make him a dog steak.

I would like to know what is the secret to cooking dog meat to taste as close to a regular sirloin steak as possible?

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    feed dog grass.
    – KMC
    Commented Sep 21, 2012 at 23:55
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    Why do you want it to taste like something else? If you want sirloin steak, eat that.
    – Mien
    Commented Sep 22, 2012 at 6:47
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    Puppybeef is of course, a hoax site parodying the old Manbeef gag.
    – user12670
    Commented Sep 24, 2012 at 12:54
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    I really hope you meant tasting dog meat in Vietnam; eating the dog food sounds like a bad plan.
    – Cascabel
    Commented Sep 24, 2012 at 17:15
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    It seems to me that steak is a way of cooking (and cutting) meat. It requires that the meat starts out tender, so that quickly browning the outside with high heat, leaving the inside rare or medium rare results in something edible. While I've never had experience with dog meat, there may well be cuts which are sufficiently tender and cuts that are not. It would likely be hard to find a butcher who would know how to cut a dog steak, since Europeans don't butcher dogs, and south-east Asians don't cook steak (it would require knives at the dinner table, which Confucius considered barbaric). Commented Sep 25, 2012 at 13:41

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It seems to me that steak is two things: a way of cutting meat, and a way of cooking it.

Recipes for cooking steak don't to my knowledge vary that much based on the cut of meat...the ideal temperature might vary, and the ideal cooking time certainly does (lean steaks are said to taste better rare, while fatty steaks are better medium rare), but the approach to cooking is the same: quickly brown the outside of the steak at high heat to cause a Maillard reaction, and then cook to the desired level of rareness.

So I think the question is more one of whether there exists an appropriate cut of dog meat to use as steak...the meat must start out tender, so that cooking it as a steak (leaving the inside rare or medium rare) results in something edible.

In cattle, some parts are sufficiently tender for steak, others are too tough, and are usually sold as roasts, so if dog meat is appropriate for steak, it might be important to get a cut from the right part of a dog. If you can find an against the grain cut of dog meat that seems sufficiently tender, there's a decent chance it will work well as steak.

Alternatively, a really good butcher might be able to identify for you whether (and what parts) of a dog carcass would make good steak and cut you one as a special request, but I think it would be hard to find a butcher who has experience cutting dog steak, since Europeans don't usually butcher dogs, and south-east Asians don't (at least traditionally) cook steak: Confucius taught that the use of knives at the dinner table was a form of violence ("The honorable and upright man keeps well away from both the slaughterhouse and the kitchen. And he allows no knives on his table." source), and as a result all meat dishes in the region involve cutting the meat into bite-size pieces before serving it, so that knives are not necessary at the dinner table (i.e. so that they can be eaten with chopsticks).

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  • For the record, I agree that steak and potatoes is pretty barbaric compared to typical south-east Asian dishes with carefully chosen ingredients, spices, and sauces...but I'd be much more concerned about dishonorable men in my kitchen than about honorable ones. Commented Sep 26, 2012 at 23:54

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