The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [121]
By the end, each of us had received ten strips of steak, deliciously browned and almost crisp on the outside, rosy inside, and brimming with juice. The chef cooked the rib-eye cap last and then the cubes of Wagyu fat, which rendered crisp as goose cracklings. There was a little dish of dipping sauce at each place—soy, garlic, honey, miso, and a secret spice whose identity is known only to Devon Steak.
While my wife was in the ladies’ room, I made off with two of her Wagyu morsels for the scientific purpose of comparing her rare with my medium-rare. Mine won. It lacked none of the tenderness and moisture that steak can lose when you grill it medium; like most blood-red meat, hers lacked a rich beefy taste.
Wagyu is not a cruel and evil hoax. It is the best beef I have ever eaten, as tender and closely grained as the finest filet mignon, with the melting juiciness of the richest rib steak and the savor of less expensive cuts like hanger and skirt steak, though with a sweeter, more delicate character. It was also the most expensive meal I’ve ever had. Kimio would not, of course, let us see the menu, but I noticed a placard on the way out of Devon Steak from which I inferred a price of 40,000 yen plus service and tax, or $340 a person. That makes Paris look like a fantastic bargain.
A few days later I was back in New York, padding down to Balducci’s again for more Wagyu. This time, I also bought a U.S. prime rib eye for comparison, identical except for its markedly more modest marbling. I improvised a griddle from a wide stainless-steel sauté pan with a thick copper bottom and clumsily tried to follow the procedure I had observed in Osaka. The Wagyu was wonderful, at least half the equal of its cousin at Devon Steak. Next to it, rare U.S. prime tasted bloody, almost wild, and required lots of savage chomping and tearing; cooked medium, it became stringy and coarse and dry.
I have finally located someone who knows the facts about Wagyu, Dr. David Lunt, superintendent of the McGregor Research Center of Texas A&M University, where they have been raising Wagyu for several years now. Their hope is that U.S. ranchers, with production costs only 30 to 50 percent of those in Japan, will be able to ship Wagyu to the lucrative Japanese market, where it fetches $60 to $150 a pound at retail, depending on the cut and quality.
The Wagyu strain of cattle was probably brought to Japan as a draft animal from Manchuria and down the Korean Peninsula in the second century A.D., at the same time that rice cultivation was introduced. Wagyu worked for at least a thousand years in the rice paddies before they were consumed as food. Most Wagyu are raised as a cottage industry on small family farms throughout Japan, though there are some large operations as well; many farmers haul their cattle to the region around Kobe for finishing and processing, because beef with the Kobe name still commands a higher price. Wagyu are not allowed to graze freely, and massage is used to soothe their stiff muscles, not to disperse their fat; they are occasionally fed beer to maintain a healthy population of microbes in their rumen, or large stomach, not to flavor their flesh or keep them relaxed. The distinctive taste and marbling of Wagyu are partly genetic and partly the result of feeding methods; their fat contains a high ratio of monosaturated oleic acid (also found in olive oil), which accounts for its buttery taste and moderate cholesterol.
The McGregor Research Center has just had its second Wagyu slaughter, and the Japanese flew over to appraise the meat. Just as U.S. government meat graders use a series of color photographs against which to compare the marbling in a slab of beef, Japanese graders use acrylic steaks, like the cute plastic food you see