What is Wagyu
For a breed of cattle that didn’t exist in Australia 20 years ago, it’s becoming ubiquitous - muscling its way on to upmarket menus all over the country. Where once you might have seen breeds such as Angus or Hereford getting a name-check, now it‘s more likely to be Wagyu.
In Sydney, Tetsuya Wakuda slices it very thinly, rolls it around Asian mushrooms and lightly grills it. Kylie Kwong deep-fries the brisket to caramelise it and flavours it with Szechuan pepper. Fashionable eatery Otto serves it raw as carpaccio.
In Melbourne, at Vue de Monde Shannon Bennett roasts the sirloin and serves it with a bearnaise sauce and pommes pont neuf (a fancy version of steak and chips?) while Flower Drum barbecues eye fillet with a Szechuan pepper sauce.
In Brisbane it’s on the menu at Cha Cha Char Grill and e‘cco.
Australian Wagyu goes offshore to such notable eateries as Nobu in both London and New York. We also export live animals to Japan for fattening so they can be sold there as Japanese beef.
Introduced to Australia in the late 1980s, Wagyu is far and away the fastest growing breed of cattle in this country. Gerry “Harvey Norman” Harvey is a notable large-scale breeder.
Literally, "Wa" means Japanese, and "gyu" means cattle. Wagyu is not one breed but four:
Black, Brown, Shorthorn and Polled. In Australia, Black Wagyu is predominant.
Wagyu is the breed which produces Kobe beef (and no, the Kobe cattle are not massaged with beer as is popularly believed, although beer may be part of their rations). Just as with Champagne, only Wagyu beef produced in the Kobe prefecture can bear that name. The
same goes for Matsukaza, the most highly prized Japanese beef. But unlike in Australia, where we kill steers (males) for eating, Matsukaza is "virgin beef" - females, whose meat is considered to have a sweeter, finer texture.
What’s so special about the breed? For a start, their meat is fattier. Fattier? As food professionals know, fat carries flavour. Without internal fat, or marbling, a steak can be as dry
and uninteresting as damp cardboard. Marbling renders the meat much juicier and therefore more delicious.
So, after a decade of being encouraged to think "lean", chefs are in revolt. And it appears that health is on their side. While external or selvage fat (around the outside of a steak) is largely saturated, research is increasingly showing that the internal, intramuscular fat in steak is proportionately much more mono-unsaturated, a beneficial fat.
In the most highly marbled - and highly prized — Wagyu, the flesh can appear almost white, such is the predominance of this lacey, filigreed internal fat.
It is claimed that Wagyu has three times the marbling ability of other high—marbling breeds, such as Angus. Marbling in meat is measured on a Japanese scale of f—12. Angus beef averages a marbling score of 2, although it can get up to 5. In comparison, thanks to their genetic predisposition, their feed regime and their age when slaughtered, Wagyu cattle average a marbling score of 4-6, and can reach the top score of 12.
At the annual Australian Wagyu Association conference held late last year, a cardiologist and a dietician reported that not only is intra-muscular fat proportionately much higher in beneficial mono-unsaturated fat, but that the ratio of mono-saturated to saturated fat is higher in Wagyu beef than in other breeds. Fifty per cent of the marbling in Wagyu beef is comprised of oleic acid, a mono-unsaturated fat.
Mono-unsaturated fats are softer than saturated fats and become liquid at a lower temperature. (The more saturated the fat, the more solid it is at room temperature.) So in a piece of Wagyu beef, the marbling melts in the cooking process at a lower temperature,
making the meat seem more juicy and moist. But very high marbling in steak cuts can be overwhelmingly rich — the higher the score, the less thick the steak should be.
The greater the meat's marbling, the higher the price it fetches. Also, whereas regular beef animals are usually slaughtered at 18 months of age, Wagyu are normally killed around 24-26 months (although some are kept up to 32-34 months), which means they are more mature and therefore taste "beefier". Because they are kept alive longer, it costs more to feed them.
So there is both serious economic and gastronomic momentum for Wagyu's continued proliferation.
Cherry Ripe was a guest judge on the tasting panel at the Australian Wagyu Association conference.
© Copyright Cherry Ripe.
Reprinted with permission of the author
