いわて牛 Iwate Beef- “Meat Icecream”
Do you see all of that beautiful marbling?
So recently on a fluke I picked up a pack of Iwate beef at my local supa (grocery). It was pretty expensive, 1000 yen for a few pieces of beef weighing less than a pound. I also picked up some regular beef for about 300 yen. I only picked up the Iwate beef because I’d heard of the name before and I thought I might treat myself after a hard week at Waseda.
You’ve probably heard about Kobe beef, but there are several different regions in Japan that have these Wagyu, including Iwate. What is so special about Iwate beef, and all Wagyu, is the marbling that permeates every inch of the meat. These cows were specially bred to produce this marbling, and there are rumors that some cows are even massaged and fed beer and sake to improve the taste of the meat.
Obviously, I’m a poor grad student, so I didn’t want to waste my money. What else is there to do but look on the forums about how to cook the meat and how it should taste? Everyone kept saying it was the texture of foi gras or ice cream, which seemed not to be the ideal texture for meat in my mind.
I read about how to cook the meat, and I’m glad I did because I would have slathered it in yaki-niku sauce, like with the normal beef, otherwise. Instead I heated up a pan for a while, salted the beef, threw it on for a few seconds and took it off. I was so excited about it I took a bite before it had even had a chance to cool down.
I have had steaks at five star restaurants that weren’t as good as this.
It really was meat ice cream.
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