Oct 27 2006
Kobe Beef, anyone?
Chef Nick was so traumatized by his Kobe Beef experiments that it knocked him right off his steak blog. I thought of him last weekend when I was at a butcher shop in Brossard and my eyes fell upon several fat packages of the overpriced phoney Japanese cow meat.
I say it’s phoney because, as Chef Nick points out, it is not Japanese beef. It is Canadian beef that is raised in a supposedly “Japanese” manner and then shipped to Japan and sold to insane people at a ridiculous markup.
However, because of the mad cow disease problem, the Japanese are no longer buying the Canuk stuff. As a result, there’s a bit of a glut of (ahem) “Kobe Beef” coming onto the market here. Without all that shipping and minus all those resellers, you can now buy overly fatty phoney “Japanese” beef for just a bit more than regular beef!
Check it out. These “Kobe Beef” tournedos (admittedly not the most pricey cut) were selling for $25.99 a kilo (the price tag on the package was $11 and change). By the look of them, they’re not even all that fatty, especially when compared with the ones Chef Nick acquired a few months ago. Some would say these are “nicely marbled.” However, tournedos are usually very lean, so this does indicate an overall high degree of fattiness.
Chef Nick bought his very fatty specimens several months ago in Montreal for a whopping $120 a kilo! Ouch! (If you check the label on his steaks compared to the label in the top image above, you can see they appear to come from the same source: Kobe Classic.)
You can learn more about Kobe Beef at the Kobe Classic website. Or you get another side of the story and cry along with Chef Nick by starting here, then reading this, and this, and this, and the climax, this.
Me? I went for the osso bucco.
4 Comments on “Kobe Beef, anyone?”
Holy Adipose Tissue, Blork Dot Org, I check in here and see you’ve come up against the Kobe Grail, right here in Quebec.
Well, let’s say I’m a bit disillusioned. Maybe that’s why I’m not posting so much on steakblog. Because when what you basically have is a secretive cartel conspiring to create an arcane mythology—one all its members buy into, because it means more profits—it’s difficult to trust what anyone says any more. Especially the ones that you think you should trust: the men manning the counters at your favorite butcher.
I might have seen it coming. In an industry in which hardly anyone can agree even on the name for a given cut of meat, how is anyone going to agree on what the best cut of meat is? It’s a vast shell game that is basically played by everyone in the business, all the way from the lowly meat-counter assistant in Montreal to the Master Butcher at the department store at Kintetsu department store in Osaka. And guess who the suckers are?
When the Mad Cow scare hit and the farmers were losing billions, you would have assumed that beef prices would have gone way, way down. But no, they went up.
This is not your 419 scam, but it’s close. Me? I’m eating a lot more chicken these days. Chicken, you can’t put a gold seal on and say you fed it sake while massaging it. At least, not yet. Will there be a chicken blog? May Be.
But I’ll have to tell ya, like a sucker I went to the Boucherie de Paris today and ordered up a one-inch thick faux-filet for $17.50 that I’ll be grilling with a Dijon-porto-cognac sauce and new potatoes for dinner.
I just won’t be blogging about it.
A Kobe beef… tournedo? I thought that the only way to properly prepare Kobe beef was in very small chunks, with all the turning and searing and magic, otherwise one just ends up with a tough fatty lump? So seeing a tournedo of “Kobe beef” just makes me think of “Wigley’s” gum in the dollar store… nice try, but *snicker*.
Incidentally: if you’ve read The Man Who Ate Everything (and YOU must have!), then you’ll remember that he found that his initial batch of home-cooked Kobe beef was an indigestible mess also… it’s all in the magic cookery.
The going spiel for how to cook Kobe beef is basically to not treat it like beef, but more like, say, foie gras. Here’s an over-the-top description from one Tanith Tyrr:
“How does Wagyu beef taste? If it’s cooked wrong, lousy. Bland. Not too flavorful. Kind of boring. If you cook it right? Awesome. Beef foie gras. Smooth, velvety, incomparably sweet with a subtle tang of savor that lingers on the palate like a rare perfume. . . . [A] Westerner used to eating a huge plate of aged beef . . . might not be able to fully appreciate the subtlety of Wagyu.”
Okay, I kind of followed the prescription. But it IS like beef, not like foie gras. You just have to like it rare. Anything more than that and it WILL be an indigestible mess. But once you get past the fact that it’s twice the cost of the most expensive beef on Earth, you’ll just say fuck it and get a nice ribeye at the local butcher.
That’s the way to cook it.