MABANK — For the first time in four years, a
gourmet extravagance — authentic Japanese Kobe beef — is allowed
back into the United States.
The question is whether anyone will care.
An American Kobe-style brand has taken its place on restaurant
menus.
The glossy black cows on Meliton Rincon's ranch in
Athens are not your average American breed. These Wagyu
cows are fattened longer, and the beef is known for its
rich flavor because of the fat that melts when cooked.
Now the high-quality beef from Japan is allowed back
into the U.S. But U.S. ranchers have gotten a foothold
in the market with their own version.
"We cannot meet demand," said Todd Hatoff,
president of Allen Brothers, which sells high-end beef to fine
restaurants. Kobe beef bursts with flavor, and the fat
melts like butter and coats your mouth with velvety richness.
The best American Kobe-style steak will cost $80 or more; a
Kobe-style hamburger can run $40.
It tastes good because of the fat. The
meat is streaked so thickly with fat, the Japanese call it
"white steak." When it's cooked, the fat melts into the meat,
infusing it with flavor.
"It's very rich, very full-flavored," said
Tom Schneller, assistant professor at the Culinary Institute of
America. "This is the cream of the crop."
Legend has it that Japanese Kobe cattle
are fed beer, massaged with sake, even soothed with soft music.
Experts say beer has been used to stimulate their appetites and
that sake makes for a glossy coat, on which they are graded.
But that is not how it's done in America,
where ranchers believe good genetics and careful feeding are the
main ingredients for quality Kobe-style beef.
"It's a great story, and we don't go out
of our way to dispel the myth, but it's really not necessary,"
said Jay Theiler, president of Idaho-based Snake River Farms.
"The two things that make Kobe-style beef are genetics and a
long feeding program."
It starts with the cows. True Kobe beef
comes from the region surrounding the city of Kobe. For
centuries, the cattle were used not for meat, but to provide the
muscle for rice cultivation. Consumption didn't really take off
until after World War II.
The American version of Kobe beef comes
from the same breed of cattle raised in Japan. Called Wagyu, a
Japanese name that means "Japanese cattle," they began arriving
in the United States in the 1990s, often aboard airplanes.
They are fattened longer than the average
American breed — they live about 26 to 32 months, compared with
18 months for U.S. beef cattle. U.S. ranchers often crossbreed
them with Angus cattle.
The beef they produce is considered better
than prime — the highest grade given by the U.S. Department of
Agriculture. Prime is for meat that is abundantly marbled with
fat. Restaurants and hotels get most of the country's prime
beef; only a small amount is sold in supermarkets.
Texas cattleman Gary Yamamoto says at
least 97 percent of his Kobe-style Wagyu beef is prime.
Nationwide, only about 2 percent of beef earns a prime rating.
The glossy black cows and calves grazing
on Yamamoto's gently rolling hills look like any other beef
cows. It's hard to tell the full-blood Wagyu cattle apart from
Angus cows that Yamamoto uses for crossbreeding.
He started with a small herd, 88 cows and
10 bulls, bought from a Japanese rancher. The rancher, Shogo
Takeda, had flown them to the U.S. so he could sell embryos and
calves more easily to Australia, another country where
Kobe-style beef is flourishing.
Yamamoto wound up buying the herd in 1999;
Takeda still advises him and visits his ranch, which is about 55
miles southeast of Dallas.
Yamamoto, a Japanese American, is not a
typical rancher. He's a professional bass fisherman with a
thriving custom lure business. He drives around his ranches with
a Chihuahua nestled in his lap.
While cattlemen can be private about their
operations, Yamamoto chats freely — confiding, for example, that
the whole thing began because he was looking for a property tax
break that comes with grazing livestock or planting trees.
"Once I got into it and learned all the
aspects, the health as well as the good taste, I was hooked,"
Yamamoto said.
Healthy beef? Healthy fatty beef?
Absolutely, Yamamoto says; he helped fund research that backs
his claim.
A Texas A&M University researcher, Stephen
Smith, concluded that compared with American beef, Wagyu beef is
much higher in unsaturated fat. It has high levels of oleic
acid, the fatty acid in olive and canola oils that has been
shown to lower bad LDL cholesterol.
"The health aspect of this animal is what
should be the standard for the U.S. cattle herd," Yamamoto said.
"If I can put these bulls on any breed and decrease the
saturated fat, that would be the standard."
Another selling point for Kobe-style beef
is that it's often raised without hormones or antibiotics.
The U.S. banned Japanese beef after mad
cow disease was discovered there in 2001. Officials ended the
ban in December after Japan ended its own embargo on American
beef, imposed because of the threat of mad cow disease.
However, the Japanese won't be sampling
American Kobe-style beef because it takes longer to raise than
the 21-month age limit Japan has imposed on beef it imports from
the United States, also to limit the mad cow threat.
There are no such limits on imports of
Japanese Kobe beef. Still, U.S. ranchers have spent four years
getting a foothold on the market.
"Just as California wines have taken off,
I think you have very good cattlemen here in the U.S. that know
how to raise cattle," said Schneller of the Culinary Institute.
