Steak - Mark Schatzker [79]
Still buzzing on otoro, we continued exploring the market and soon found ourselves staring at a display fridge full of meat, though it was so fatty that “meat” may no longer have been the correct term for it. We were gazing at a loin of beef ornamented with wisps of fat that looked like crochet work, a pervasive filigree that reached into every nook of red muscle. It was the most marbled steak I had ever seen.
“Kobe beef,” I said, nodding my head, appraising the effects of hand massages and beer finishing. I had seen any number of photographs of Kobe beef on the Internet, but they had in no way prepared me for the sight of the real thing. It seemed unbelievable—and in a technical sense, it was, because the store owner informed me that I wasn’t looking at Kobe beef at all. It was Iwate beef.
Chada-san explained. Iwate beef, he said, is a different brand of beef from Kobe beef. In Japan, the word “brand” more closely corresponds to the way it’s used by American ranchers, who sear brands into the rumps of their cattle. A brand in Japan tells you where your food has come from. Kobe beef comes from Kobe. Iwate beef comes from Iwate. As the Japanese see it, every part of their country has its own distinctive climate, geology, water, traditions, and so forth. Each region, therefore, produces its own equally distinctive foods, and they all compete with one another to produce the very best. Branding, you might say, is the Japanese version of terroir.
Some of that Japanese terroir is better than other terroir, which means that products from some regions are more expensive than products from others—Kagoshima pork and Koshihikari rice, to name two. Unscrupulous restaurants have even been known to lie about the brand of food they are serving. Every now and then, Chada-san said, the police would bust a restaurant for selling, say, Nagoya chicken—which is considered excellent—that is, in truth, a lesser brand of chicken.
As brands of beef go, Iwate is no Kobe. The most marbled beef I’d ever seen wasn’t actually all that well marbled, at least not as the Japanese view it. They have an elaborate grading system to rate marbling and beef quality. The most marbled beef is rated A5. The Iwate loin scored A3, which made it firmly middle-of-the-road beef. The Iwate beef may have been so marbled as to look like a doily, but in Japan a steak that looks like a doily is merely average, apparently.
Ten hours later, I encountered A5 beef, though A5 fat would be a more accurate way of putting it. Chada-san invited me to join his family for dinner at a place called Fuku Buku. It was a yakiniku restaurant, which means you sit in booths around a table with a grill at its center and a waitress ferries platters of raw, thinly sliced beef from the kitchen that you cook yourself while drinking successive glasses of ice-cold Japanese draft beer. It sounds like a scheme hatched by a restaurant accountant as a means of moving chef salaries off the balance sheet, but the spectacle of beef cooking provides unending entertainment.
The A5 steaks were at most 3 millimeters thick and cut into perfect rectangles the size of business cards. They looked like right-angled snowflakes. They were not Kobe beef but A5 Saga (the loin) and A5 Kagoshima (the shoulder), and both brought to mind a gum I chewed in my youth called Freshen-up, which came in cube-shaped pieces that featured a gel center that detonated between two molars to the great thrill of its chewer. The burst of beefy deliciousness from the steak, however, was exponentially grander, and I had to restrain myself from verbal exclamation, which would have sent out a spray of beef fat—every drop of which I wanted to keep in my mouth. In terms of tenderness, the beef was about as tough as overripe banana. It was not soggy