I have side with "roadrash" on this one.

I have Kobe beef both in Japan in and the states, as well as what can be considered as american kobe beef. I sell a lot cubed alfalfa to meat producers in Japan, and have been their guest on numerous occassions, and the have also sat at my table

I will put any of my beef cattle that I raise for my own table against any beef that I have ever tasted, that includes Kobe from Japan, Argentinian blue grass fed. etc.

Granted the stuff you get at Safeway, Raleys, Krogers, Farmer John’s Wal-Mart, the A&P, San’s Club, etc, does not stack up to quality beef, but it is certainly much more affordable. And beef is good for you.

Not a huge fan of Kobe beef. I’ve had it, and quite frankly am unable to distinguish it from prime beef (though my wallet surely could). I wonder if anyone has tried any blind taste tests between Kobe beef and other, less expensive prime cuts to see if diners are truly able to distinguish the difference. I suspect this is mostly a NYC/LA hipster fad, though.

We’ve had a number of threads on Kobe beef here, but I think a number of them have contained information that just confused the issue. So when I saw this article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, it seemed to neatly summarize the current (and recent past) situation for us. By the way, pasting in the article is the only way for non-subscribers to see it:

quote:

Eating Out
Kobe’s Comeback:
The $120 Steak — for One
Considered by some the ultimate in beef, Kobe’s return is lifting U.S. red-meat standards to new levels
By RAYMOND SOKOLOV
August 5, 2006; Page P1

The first time I heard about the legendary Kobe beef of Japan was in a 1961 Italian movie about decadence. In "Mondo Cane" (Dog World), Japanese cowpokes massaged and bottle-fed their black Wagyu steers with beer and sake.

The flesh of these pampered bovines is considered by some the ultimate in steak, hypermarbled with fat and rich with flavor. But an import ban has kept it off U.S. tables in recent years. Now authentic Kobe beef is back — and surfacing on menus in high-end restaurants.

Tasting this once-forbidden beef doesn’t come cheap. Restaurants like Wolfgang Puck’s new Cut in Beverly Hills, Calif., are charging $20 an ounce for New York strip steak or filet mignon. Ordering can be confusing, too, since "Kobe" on a menu doesn’t always mean the same thing. From Dallas to Detroit, restaurants serve Kobe beef that’s actually raised in the U.S., sometimes according to traditional Japanese methods.

Is the real Kobe worth all the fuss — and extra expense? Yes. After grazing my way through an artery-clogging tour of steaks, I can report the standard for red meat in America has now been bumped up to a new level in quality as well as price.

In red-meat Detroit, we sampled domestic Kobe short ribs and ribeye steak. Then, in the eerily flamboyant dining room of Megu Downtown in New York, next to a statue of a samurai in gilt armor set over a pool afloat with rose petals, we ate a genuine Japanese Kobe steak sizzling on a lava rock big enough to be a dragon’s egg. There was Kobe sushi, a very tasty Kobe burger, Kobe this, Kobe that. The waiter, a Sly Stone lookalike converted overnight to this new high-protein religion, burbled: "We just started getting this from Japan last week. We used to get it from Oregon."

Our excitement over the true Kobe from Japan matched his. The uniquely high fat content melts into the very tender flesh of these lavishly fed animals, giving them the amazingly meaty flavor that the Japanese call umami. Other high-end steak lacks the buttery mouthfeel that Kobe has when it’s cooked to medium, so that the fat suffuses the meat.

The kobe beef story is partly about trade politics. After much hemming and hawing in Tokyo and Washington, and mutual bans stemming from incidents of mad-cow disease detected around five years ago on both sides of the Pacific, beef has started trading in both directions: Tons of comparatively cheap U.S. meat went west and a little Japanese Kobe hit our shores in the last few weeks.

During the Kobe Prohibition era, enterprising U.S. restauranteurs and Internet butchers had been softening up the dining public with other boutique beefs, aged until they lost their juice, grass-fed, deprived of antibiotics, saved from feedlots. Often these cuts were labeled Kobe when they came from Colorado or Australia, or Wagyu when the animals had been interbred with Black Angus, contained varying percentages of Wagyu-breed DNA and carried no assurance they’d been cosseted � la japonaise. Then the ban was lifted and what will surely turn into a stampede began.

For now the real stuff is trickling into the country. But as restaurateurs develop contacts in Japan, they’re likely to,7,224544,0,20349,67.101.96.140
224543,224532,224532,2006-08-26 01:39:44,RE: Religious “”feasts”””