Steak - Mark Schatzker [84]
I was, by this point, struggling to overcome fatigue, lethargy, and a feeling of intense stupidity, a state I tend to reach when I eat too much fat. It had happened most acutely a few years earlier in Quebec, where I was researching a story for a travel magazine that involved eating foie gras twice a day for six consecutive days. I now felt as if liquid fat were running through my arteries and gumming up the synapses in my brain. I was experiencing the opposite of meat hunger: vegetable hunger. I wanted raw cucumber. I craved undressed salad. As the saxophone segued into a blistering guitar solo, I stared dumbly at the still-sweltering rock.
The Japanese love their otoro and their marbled beef, but they rarely OD on fat. Fat is considered an occasional treat in Japan, even for the well-off. It is the leanness of the Japanese diet that makes fat a gustatory thrill. It is a land of grilled fish and pickled vegetables, where people snack on rice balls, not potato chips. No Japanese person would ever eat beef ranging from A3 to A5 twice in less than twenty-four hours, as I had just done.
It is ironic, in fact, that Japan is famous for steak, because the Japanese are not Beef Loyals. They eat only twenty pounds a year—a third as much as a typical American (or Canadian). They have only been eating steak since 1868, when a thousand-year-old ban on eating four-legged animals was lifted by Emperor Meiji. They eat it in little pieces, as though one and a half centuries later, they’re trying it for the first time.
By the 1950s, they had mastered the technique of producing beef that, in terms of marbling, had no equal anywhere in the world. They perfected beef just as they perfected the art of deep-frying (which they were taught by Portuguese traders in the sixteenth century); jeans (Japanese selvage denim is without peer); French pastry (many consider the French desserts in Tokyo to be superior to those for sale in Paris); the art of folding paper (origami’s roots are Chinese); the grill-your-own restaurant (yakiniku is from Korea, originally); martial arts (karate’s roots are in China); and cameras, cars, knives, and toilet hygiene technology.
The Japanese are not famous for inventing things. They are famous for perfecting the inventions of others. They take foreign things and improve them to a point where they become nearly unrecognizable from the original. In Portuguese deep-fried fish, they saw a diamond in the rough, and by the time it was carved and polished it wasn’t Portuguese anymore, it was Japanese tempura. It became, like the bonsai tree (another foreign import), almost a caricature of perfection, though with an unmistakably Japanese soul.
In the case of Kobe beef, the Japanese soul is the breed of cattle. The Japanese call it kuroge wagyu, “black-haired Japanese cow,” and to foreigners it is the black Wagyu. Imports from mainland Asia, these cattle first appeared on Japanese soil around two thousand years ago and spent the subsequent centuries as beasts of burden, plowing rice paddies, dragging logs out of forests, or hauling ore out of underground mines.
Black Wagyu have more slow-twitch muscle fibers than other breeds and marble to a degree an Angus rancher could only dream of. Like all cattle—all mammals, actually—they possess a gene called SCD, but in black Wagyu, it is particularly well expressed. SCD produces an enzyme called delta-9-desaturase, which grabs hold of a stearic acid molecule, which is saturated, and sticks a double bond in its long chain of carbon atoms, converting it into the monounsaturated oleic acid. Thanks to delta-9-desaturase, the fat in a Wagyu steak is so soft it melts in your hands when raw and washes off