Steak - Mark Schatzker [87]
Kubo-san feeds his cattle hay, wheat, crushed soybeans, corn, rice straw, and barley. The grain is from Australia, and the wheat is from the United States. (Canada, land of inferior buckwheat, contributes nothing.) As far as the flavor of the beef is concerned, he told me, soybeans are very important.
No classical music was playing. I had heard that Japanese farmers pipe Mozart or Beethoven into their barns so as to soothe their cows between massages and buckets of beer, and promote even more marbling. Besides talking, the only sounds were cattle shuffling in their stalls and an occasional moo.
“Do they drink beer?” I asked.
“In the summertime.”
“How much?”
“One bottle a day,” Kubo-san said. The myths of Japanese beef cattle husbandry were falling apart before my eyes. “For Princess 8 only.”
“What kind of beer?”
“Kirin. It is cheap.”
Kubo-san explained that a cold beer can stimulate a cow’s appetite on a hot day, but it seemed to me that the real reason Princess 8 was getting Kirin was because she was his favorite. The other eight cows in the barn, after all, didn’t get a drop.
When I asked Kubo-san if he massaged his cattle, he giggled. Like Chada-san, he marveled at the idiotic beliefs foreigners carry in their heads about Japan. What Kubo-san did do, he told me, was brush his cattle, which didn’t do a thing for marbling, but did make them look nice. He only ever brushed his cattle before entering them into a show.
“What about sake?” By now I was scrambling.
“In the past,” Kubo-san said, “people sprayed some sake before they brushed, to make the fur look more sleek and lustrous. But sake can also make the fur appear red.” Now farmers used something even better, he said. Kubo-san opened a closet and retrieved this wondrous substance: a plastic shampoo bottle displaying the words “Lux Super Rich.”
Kubo-san hopped into Princess 8’s stall to demonstrate, rubbing her flank in circular motions with a straw brush and sending up a cloud of sweet-smelling dust. Princess 8 obviously loved it. Her master did, too.
Like Bill O’Brien’s feedlots, Kubo-san’s barn is a place cattle are brought to get fat on grain. But there is a reason his barn is 0.002 percent the size of Texas Beef. There is a reason the air smells like potpourri, each stall has a window, and his cows become happy every time Kubo-san walks through the door. He believes that happy cows taste better. He has treated cattle well since he was twelve, when he asked his father for a pet cow and, unlike so many children who ask their fathers for ridiculous pets—I requested an elephant—actually got one. He has raised cows for sixty-six years and says the secret to good beef is very soft fat, and that you can tell good Japanese beef by placing a slice on a newspaper, because the fat will melt through. If you put young beef on a newspaper, the fat won’t soak through to the other side.
“Do you use hormones?”
“Never!” Kubo-san said, crossing his arms on his chest and turning his face away in a pose suggestive of wounded pride, but also disgust, as though the mere mention of hormones had brought shame upon us all. Wagyu cattle are not so sensitive, fortunately. Princess 8 stuck her head out of her stall, nuzzled my elbow and then licked me, leaving a streak of saliva from the middle of my chest to my shoulder. Patting her head, I grasped her horn and in a state of mild shock announced, “It’s warm.”
“It is a sign of good health,” Kubo-san said, his pride intact once again.
Everything I’d been told about Japanese cows was false. The accounts of sake-soaked massages, buckets of beer, and Mozart piano concertos were all myths. The cattle were just fed a long time. As steak epiphanies go, this one wasn’t as deflating as I might have feared.