Maybe you don’t need to spend big money to eat yakiniku at home. Or maybe you do…

When you think of yakiniku, you’re probably more likely to think of a restaurant where you grill your meat over a fire grill. But in the last few years, many people have found ways to enjoy their favorite restaurant meals at home, and that goes for yakiniku too. That’s why yakiniku plates, which are often metal plates specifically designed for cooking thin-sliced cuts of beef and pork, are a hot-ticket item these days. But how much should you be spending on one? Does it need to be expensive?

Our Japanese-language reporter Go Hatori wanted to find out. He’d actually purchased a yakiniku plate years ago for about 2,000 yen (US$14.68), but it’s no fun firing up a huge plate just to have a yakiniku party by yourself, so Go, who lives alone, had never really used it.

That’s why when he found a yakitori plate the perfect size for a single person at 100-yen shop Daiso, he couldn’t help but be excited. It was one of Daiso’s more expensive products that sells for 500 yen, but still super reasonable. Go didn’t hesitate to snatch it up to test it out.

The official name of the product, which boasted the ability to “cook delicious food with minimal unevenness in temperature”, was “Yakiniku Plate -Cast Iron-“. Its dome-shaped plate measured just 16 centimeters in diameter (6.3 inches). Though it’s not mentioned anywhere on the product packaging, Go assumed that, based on its size, it was meant to be a tool for camping.

He wanted to see how well it would cook yakiniku at home, so after lightly seasoning its cast-iron surface, he prepared some quality meat…

Fired up the gas stove…

Greased up the cast iron plate with some beef tallow…

And laid some beef strips on it!

…Then the safety function on his stove kicked in and shut off the flame with a beep. Go couldn’t figure out what was triggering the safety function–maybe it was the shape of the plate?–so he gave up and decided to use a portable propane stove instead.

Once he fired that up, he encountered no issues.

The meat sizzled nicely, making Go salivate and his stomach rumble.

“Mm! It’s good!”

He tried some pork…

“Mm! It’s good!”

Next, he tried some larger cuts of meat, like sukiyaki cuts.

“Mm! It’s good!”

It worked perfectly fine as an ordinary cast iron plate, though cast iron does come with some hands-on care. However, even for Go, who was eating by himself, it seemed a little small for at-home use. He got fed up with cooking the meat in such small batches, so he decided to break out his aforementioned, long-neglected, more expensive yakiniku plate, which was by home goods maker Iwatani.

And when he used it to grill up the remainder of his meat…

He found that the Iwatani plate grilled it so much better!

It was immediately obvious how much better it was.

In addition to having plenty of space to grill everything…

It was treated with fluorine and thus didn’t need the care of a cast-iron plate…

And it definitely produced meat that was…

Way more…

De…

-li…

-cious!!

It might have seemed obvious, but Go hadn’t realized how differently the two plates would cook the meat. The family-use cast iron really surprised Go with how much better it worked. The small one from Daiso would probably be fine for camping if that’s what you buy it for, but it’s really not great for using at home because of its size. Like in Go’s experience, it may not be usable with every stove, either. Plus, the Iwatani plate can cook about four times as much meat at once, so it’s much better for feeding a family (or one very hungry individual).

Every item has its use, but this experiment taught Go, who is a frequent tester of Daiso products and rarely finds them lacking, that sometimes it does pay off to spend more money. After all, if you’re going to spend money on high quality meat to grill, you’re going to want to spend money on high quality tools to grill it, right?

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