Does Asda Sell Grass Fed Beef
Well I didn't expect that. Asda, the buttock-slapper's favourite, is about to start selling wagyu beef. That's the Japanese stuff supposedly massaged by geishas, fed with beer and free to enjoy a long and Zen-like existence in some twittering prefecture.
A 170g Australian wagyu filet mignon costs £85 plus service at Wolfgang Puck's restaurant on Park Lane, while Asda is selling its version for around 30 quid a kilo. The new beef is reared in Wales and sired by a bull called Shogun, whose semen Asda is able to sell for about £7.50 a "straw", whereas the same quantity of wagyu tadpoles ordinarily cost about £50.
If it all seems too good to be true, that's because it is. Asda recently sent out samples of its wagyu to the press, and though the meat was impressive for supermarket steak, it didn't compare with proper wagyu. It was wet and slightly anaemic-looking, and most importantly it had only a few specks of fat distributed within its flesh. All wagyu is graded on a scale of one to nine (or one to 12 in some jurisdictions) according to how much intramuscular fat it contains – the famous marbling.
Most of Asda's wagyu will be graded three or four. By way of comparison I got some "proper" Australian wagyu from Harrods. (You can't buy imported Japanese wagyu here, and you might not want to for reasons of welfare.) The Australian stuff was graded six, cost just under £100 for the steak was and among the best pieces of beef I've tasted. People often describe meat as melting: real wagyu almost literally does, as the high fat levels baste the muscle from within.
Asda plans to slaughter its beasts younger than the Australian farmer does, which means that its animals will not have had time to gain as much fat. An Asda spokesman told me that while a youngish steer might need to eat 6kg of food to put on 1kg of meat, once the animal is older it can need to consume 12kg to gain the same weight. That obviously makes the older meat more expensive but also fattier – and in wagyu-land, as throughout gastronomy, the flavour is in the fat.
Whether or not Asda's new product constitutes "proper" wagyu, it's better than their ordinary beef and is almost certain to have been reared to higher welfare standards than the traditional Japanese product: authentic Japanese wagyu is often kept in conditions that make European battery farms look virtually paradisal.
Raymond Blanc is one of the few western chefs to have visited a Japanese wagyu farm, which he did some years ago. He told me: "The Kobe beef I saw was being reared in stables. The animals had never seen a geisha or drunk any beer, poor sods. I was disgusted." Beer and massage aside, his account of their conditions did sound grim, the cattle "kept in wooden boxes", he has written. "They were dirty, their rumps covered in their own excrement."
Until the Meiji restoration of 1868, strict adherence to Buddhism and Shinto meant that Japan ate little beef. The country lacks the space to graze large herds, so such cattle as did exist tended to work on farms. The American food writer Barry Estabrook notes that steers reared for beef from the late 19th century onwards were often kept in confined conditions. The resulting stress and boredom might have caused them to lose their appetites, while the lack of exercise meant that they developed arthritis. Some of the romance of wagyu may stem from this: beer could have stimulated the animals to eat more, and massage might have helped the arthritic creatures walk to market.
Blanc sells Suffolk-reared wagyu at Le Manoir, and he's complimentary about wagyu produced elsewhere. "In Australia and America the herds are mostly grass-fed and finished with cereals. When the animals are well-reared and killed under no stress whatsoever, the meat flavour is extraordinary and has a very melting quality from the fat."
Proper humanely-reared wagyu is one of the most delicious meats in the world. Asda's version is a lean and wet approximation, but is the effort to provide an economy version of a luxury product laudable or futile?
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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2011/nov/16/asda-wagyu-beef-raising-steaks
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