The history, science and taste of Wagyu beef

this video is sponsored by crowd cow what even is wagyu beef and why do people pay literally hundreds of us dollars per pound for it well wagyu literally just means japanese cattle and while you may have heard a bunch of crazy things about cows getting spa massages and drinking sake or was it bathing in sake i don't know but regardless the reason why this is so special is primarily just genetics japanese cattle probably due to their longtime geographic isolation have a few pretty unusual traits the most remarkable being their potential to grow a huge quantity of intramuscular fat aka marbling this chunk of wagyu rib section is graded a5 which is as good as it gets a means the animal yielded more meat than a b or c carcass and five means it has the most marbling on a one to five scale it is literally about half fat half meat i've eaten real wagyu once or twice in restaurants very small amounts this is my first time handling it cutting it cooking it i'm gonna describe the experience as best i can describe what it's like at different levels of doneness different ways of butchering it and i will offer a cautionary note about eating too much of it in one sitting but first some historical and scientific background which i am primarily drawing from this excellent 2018 paper in the asian australasian journal of animal sciences the term wagyu refers to four big japanese cattle breeds but these days most of it is one breed japanese black cattle which are exactly what they sound like and while the breed's roots are ancient its meat was not always so shot through with fatty snowflakes that is the result of a change in trade policy that occurred when i was in the fourth grade 1991 the so-called uruguay round of world trade organization negotiations japan finally agreed to allow imports of foreign beef japanese beef producers were rightly terrified that they were about to get muscled out of their own market muscled out i see what you did there i mean japan is not naturally suited to inexpensive beef production the united states is and huge swathes of it remain to this day very sparsely populated grasslands where legions of cattle can graze on endless free food japan doesn't have much land at all and a lot of what they do have is rocks the rest is rice and cities so if japanese farmers figured they couldn't compete with imports on price they could compete on quality turn domestically grown japanese beef into a luxury good instead of bowls and cows they started producing more steers and heifers that is castrated males and celibate females you can't get new calves out of them but you can get fattier meat the farmers also started feeding the animals way more concentrated feed that is grains like corn as opposed to roughage stuff like rice straw which is not as energy dense but it's very available in japan because japan is mostly rocks rice and cities most of that grain has to be imported from overseas which really drives up the cost of the beef another thing that makes it more expensive is the wagyu animals are slaughtered when they're a little bit older they get fattier meat that way generally slaughtered around 30 months these and other techniques were combined with the wagyu's peculiar genetics and the result is this preposterous beef butter that really could only have worked in a consumer market like japan the traditional japanese way of eating is big bowl of rice that's the main event and then you have some other stuff with it beef that is literally half fat works when you're only planning to have a few little bites of it with your rice in america or argentina or australia where pastures are wide and beef is cheap the traditional beef dinner is a big honkin steak the meat is the main event and that works with relatively lean beef trust me you would not want to belly up to a big 12 ounce wagyu steak the way you would with a traditional american steak you're not going to feel good cautionary tale coming the first wagyu beef i remember hearing about here in the states was kobe kobe is wagyu from a particular black cattle strain produced in the area around kobe or at least that's what it's supposed to be japan did not export any beef until 2012. so if you ordered kobe off a menu in new york before then you were either getting hot product that somebody had smuggled in or more likely you were eating a cow that had been raised here in the states that had some wagyu variety as part of its gene pool there are now producers all over the world raising great wagyu beef either purebred or more likely a cross wagyu calves are in short supply and so they literally cost more than i paid for my car and as a result purebred wagyu is in short supply outside of japan most wagyu produced outside of japan ain't the real deal this is the real deal and it came to my kitchen courtesy of the sponsor of this video crowd cow whom i'll now briefly thank before we taste this crowd cow is a marketplace for high quality meat and seafood you can get wagyu and all kinds of other stuff here from all over the world it's a way to get better tasting stuff and support farmers who are raising meats the right way pasture-raised heirloom chickens from california real maine lobsters all kinds of beef including high quality american wagyu and japanese wagyu mine came from down south in kagoshima the packaging is recyclable and the meat came flawlessly vacuum sealed and flash frozen kept rock hard on dry ice dry ice is magic and you can have a lot of fun with it later in a well-ventilated room anyway i thought it in the fridge and this is obviously totally unmarred by its journey across the world build your box and join the herd become a member of crowd cow for free and get perks like free shipping on orders above 99 do us both a favor go to crowdcow.com and get 15 off your first order plus an extra 5 off everything when you become a member membership is free my referral link is in the description thank you crowd cow now let's cut this i can't do it i'm too scared hey it's like the sword in the stone who so sliceth the meat is right wise king born i'll try again and look at that there is so much intramuscular fat that you almost don't see the inter muscular fat that line of fat there between the eye and the cat muscles that's inter muscular fat as opposed to intra which is inside the specific muscles let's just taste a little sliver of this raw yes raw meat always carries some risk but i'm a big boy and this is from the deep interior of an incredibly high quality piece of beef what's immediately apparent is the special smell of wagyu wagyu has this just sweet umamiyi flavor that some recent research attributes to the particular fatty acid composition in this meat the fatty acids break down into pretty powerful odorants wagyu has a high proportion of unsaturated fats relative to other fatty acids and gram for gram that actually makes this fat healthier for you than other more saturated animal fat unsaturated fat is also of course softer which helps this melt in your mouth even when you eat it raw but let's cook some i've cut three equal pieces here and i'm going to try to cook them to contrasting donenesses a little salt and nothing else this is too precious to cover up with other flavors i don't know why i bothered putting oil in the pan just then i did it reflexively wagyu will instantly render out enough fat in a dry pan to where it can cook in its own fat this one i'm just going to cook rare blue still raw on the inside so we can really taste the pure product this next piece with that beautiful hunk of ribeye cap hanging off of it i'm going to try to cook like medium medium rare i'm not totally sure what's going on in there judging by feel the meat is so soft no matter how much i cook it and this last piece i'm going to try to cook like medium well a little tough for me to tell by feel it's so soft look at all the fat that is accumulated in this pan here let me take this out and show you look at that it's like cooking foie gras it just melts in the pan like an ice cube if you cook it for too long okay there's our three steaks the blue one is nice but i feel like i'm not getting the full flavor of the fat it's just too solid still here's the one that i tried to cook medium well maybe it's still kind of pink that is insanely delicious and here's the one that i tried to cook medium medium rare not a huge difference but man that tastes really good that fat really does have a subtle sweet aroma that's like nothing i've ever had and the texture well first it's obviously extremely tender and why is that well back to this paper as they show here the intramuscular fat disrupts the growth of connective tissue networks within the meat the flecks of fat literally get in the way of the tough tissue growing and linking up with itself the result is weak muscles but extremely tender meat and i've struggled to come up with a more flattering way to say this but the meat has a spongy quality to it spongy in a good way and you can see why this happens you can see those melty cells or chambers of fat inside that meat that's like the water inside the sponge as you bite into this meat you feel that soft porous web of meat crush between your teeth and you feel that fat burst out of its little pockets that's a textural experience that i've never had with meat only gushers since i kind of failed to overcook that one let's cook this one some more and see if wagyu works even when cooked well done well that spongy texture is amplified because the protein structure has gotten a lot firmer but it's still super tender and juicy i think what i learned from this is a don't be afraid because it's pretty hard to screw this up pretty much any way you cook it it's going to be good and b i think that i prefer wagyu cooked a little bit north of medium rare so that more of that fat can go melty and you can really taste it but now i've eaten like 10 or 12 ounces of a5 wagyu and i need to stop well maybe one more bite and i wish i hadn't done that i had to go lie down for a while after this my stomach really hurt fat digests much slower than protein or carbohydrates and as a result your stomach does not empty as fast into your small intestine when you've had a very high fat meal so your stomach literally fills up faster you just feel fuller and you might have further troubles downstream because your pancreas and your liver can only work so fast to create the enzymes and the bile that you need to break down these fats so if you want my advice get yourself some wagyu but only eat like a little candy bars worth of it at a time that's simply all your system can handle you have more than that you're gonna have a bad time luckily small portions also make this luxury more affordable indeed a common way to eat this is to just cut tiny strips of meat cook them and then eat them one at a time the cattle might not actually be getting spa treatments and bathing in sake but i sure feel like i am living that life when i eat this

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 1,410,928

Rating: 4.9371881 out of 5

Keywords: wagyu, kobe, wayoo, wagoo, kobay

Id: YW249cc4NhQ

Length: 11min 0sec (660 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 16 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/TheXanderp]

'The Breed's roots are ancient' Yeah ok, all breed's roots are ancient - I believe Japanese cows were interbred with European cows around 1900 and Wagyu cattle is was resulted...

[u/eweidenbener]

Love me some Adam Ragusea

[u/[deleted]]

Does anyone else see this as looking like pure fat? Is the real mystery that people just like fat?

[u/SupperTime]

I bought Wagyu for my birthday this month. It’s currently frozen in my freezer. How do I go about making it the best way possible?

I had initially cooked it 1 minute on each side at room temperature last month (different wagyu steak) and it was a little tough in some areas - I think tendon.

[u/Lincolnton]

I wonder if he seasoned the cutting board for this one

[u/JohnWangDoe]

Adam getting yoked af

[u/chathu86]

😛😛😛😛

[u/ringisdope]

I had it once and it literally melts in your mouth, it's an experience rather than a meal however.