Steak - Mark Schatzker [88]
I started thinking about dinner. Despite having overdosed on fat the previous night—not to mention my A3 beef lunch and a nagging case of vegetable hunger—I wasn’t about to leave Matsusaka without tasting Matsusaka Special Beef.
Before leaving, Chada-san and I drove toward the top of Mount Shirai, parked the car, and took in the view. As in Switzerland, every square foot of ground in Japan seems to have been mindfully put to a specific use, even the country’s limited wild patches, which are as bound by the hand of civilization as a putting green. The valley stretched out below us, as landscaped as any golf course, and equally inviting. Behind us, the paved road and the rectangular groves of tea plants gave way to a patch of wild forest that was home to a band of monkeys. It had never occurred to me that Japanese monkeys might be living so close to Japanese cattle—I assumed they had by now been relegated to nature reserves. I wanted very much, all of a sudden, to see Japanese macaques, which are famous for their penchant for luxuriating in hot springs. Chada-san explained that they weren’t friendly and warned me that they might throw fruit, but this only made me want to see them more.
No monkeys appeared, unfortunately, with or without fruit. We drove down the valley and back into town for Matsusaka Special Beef, which was so tender I could cut it with chopsticks.
The list of people who have eaten high-grade Japanese beef four times in a little over two days is not long, but my name may now be added to it. If there are other names on that list, I doubt many of them are Japanese. Even Kubo-san, who professed a stronger love of steak than any Japanese person I’ve ever met, limits his intake to 100 grams (3.5 ounces) a week. (It would take Kubo-san almost five months to get through a Texas King.) The Japanese prize A5 beef beyond all other grades. Big corporations like Toyota or Sony will shell out tens of thousands of dollars for the prestige of serving an extremely well marbled carcass, but I believe their reverence for the A5 beef exceeds their love of the way it actually tastes. Of all the Japanese beef eaters to whom I spoke, only two men—the younger government official in Matsusaka and Kubo-san—claimed to prefer A5 beef. Everyone else thought it was too fatty. Everyone else preferred A3.
The day after my visit to Kubo-san, I visited a slaughterhouse near Nagoya—enormous by Japanese standards, but tiny compared to bovine-processing complexes stateside—where I sat down with a government meat official who’d been inspecting absurdly marbled Japanese carcasses for thirty years. He showed me a plastic color chart that displayed the spectrum of color for beef fat as a series of differently shaded white Chic-lets, progressing from creamy yellow on one end to very slightly off white in the middle to perfectly white on the other end. Fat, he said, should be pure white, but he explained that beta-carotene in grass or hay can imbue it with yellow, which, to the Japanese, is a negative trait.
“Does yellow fat taste bad?” I asked. He said no. The problem wasn’t how it tasted, but how it looked. “When beef is raw,” he explained, “white fat looks better than yellow fat.” Set against red flesh, white makes for a more pleasing contrast. He brought out a flesh chart that ranged from pale red on one end all the way to a deep carmine on the other. The ideal was in the middle—not too light, not too dark. Dark flesh, he said, could taste excellent, but it didn’t look good.
Here was a man who knew his steak. If ever there was a true Japanese steak aficionado, it was the beef grader from Nagoya, a man at least in his fifties wearing designer jeans and a jean jacket.
“How often do you eat steak?” I asked, ready to high-five a fellow Beef Loyal.
“I don’t like beef.” He announced this matter-of-factly, like it was one of the more incidental