Steak - Mark Schatzker [89]
The revelation led to deeper, more troubling questions. Did anyone in Japan like steak? What, for that matter, was steak? My working definition, thus far, was any piece of beef that was cooked quickly. That was now proving to be problematic. For one thing, by the terms of that definition the best steak I ate in Japan was a piece of A3 Matsusaka beef tongue. Could tongue be considered steak? It is a muscle, not an organ, and it comes from a cow. It was cooked quickly, and it tasted like steak.
If anything, the Japanese beef tongue was more steaklike than the so-called steak cuts—the rib eye, the strip loin—that were, basically, pieces of swirly beef fat transformed by intense heat into rich morsels of mouth-bursting smoothness. They were the beef equivalent of otoro. The tongue, at least, retained some degree of meatiness.
There is no sense of blood in Japanese steak. For the Japanese, steak is not about cutting through a piece of half-cooked muscle and gulping down its succulent juices. While Wagyu beef satisfies fat hunger, I’m not sure it satisfies meat hunger. It is, in other words, a texture thing.
This revelation descended after swallowing a mouthful of extraordinarily high-end Japanese tofu. I was back in Tokyo again, attempting to slake my still-unsated case of vegetable hunger. I found a family-run tofu operation that has been selling top-quality tofu for more than a century. Like almost everything else in Japan, tofu was brought from elsewhere—in this case, China in the eighth century—but the Japanese have elevated it to the loftiest of culinary heights. The curd, which I ate out of a little bamboo cup, was silky and so light as to be reminiscent of helium. A soy flavor was present, but you almost had to concentrate to properly savor it. The whole point of the food, it seemed to me, was its texture, a fact the gentleness of the flavor seemed to underline.
The rogue chef in Matsusaka—the one who said Matsusaka beef tastes the same as all the others—was almost right. The various brands of Japanese beef do taste rather similar. There are quality differences—the product coming out of Matsusaka and Kobe seemed more tender and juicy and didn’t stick to the grill—but in terms of flavor, the differences between Kobe, Matsusaka, Gumma, Ohmi, and all the others are, at best, only minor. Matsusaka beef tasted somewhat sweeter to me than Kobe beef, although the sample size was hardly scientific. Good luck telling them apart in a blind tasting.
Laurent Vernet had warned me about this back in Scotland. He spent weeks in Asia eating meat and cautioned me against “the boredom of grain-fed beef.” “You don’t have variation of flavors in Asia,” he said. “It all tastes the same.”
And yet the Japanese have a sense of culinary subtlety more discriminating than that of any other nation on the planet. Japan is a land of absurdly delicate soba dough and handmade tofu. It is the land of discerning regionalists, where people get busted by the cops for lying about where their chicken is actually from. It is a land of pure savors—and that may explain why it is that the Japanese eat so little steak. Strictly speaking, their steak is not a terroir food. It reflects the people of Japan—their ingenuity, their unfailingly high standards, and their great farming skills. But when you take a slice of grilled black Wagyu beef fattened on Australian grain and American wheat and put it into your mouth, what nature are you tasting?
As I prepared to fly back across the Pacific, I felt the stirrings of ennui. The Japanese, I decided, are not weird. It is westerners, with their mythical tales of underwear-dispensing vending machines and cattle subjected to Swedish massage, who seem to wish that oddness upon them. The Japanese are, however, prideful. Like the French, they take their passions seriously. That was something I was going to miss. Americans talk marbling, but if marbled beef ever becomes an Olympic event, the Japanese will win every medal.
Before catching the bus back to the airport—the