Beef. It seems these days everyone has something to say about it. I started thinking about this the other day when I came across some Wagyu Beef Sausages in Coles, and wondered to myself who wasn’t getting in on the act when it came to beefing up the appeal of this sometimes controversial meat.
McDonald’s and Hungry Jacks tried to raise their foodie appeal and went to head to head in the ‘gourmet’ Angus beef burger war in the middle of last year, with consumers asked to decide if that wanted an Angry Angus, Mighty Angus or the Grand Angus. At an average of 56.5g of fat and 3532 kilojoules for the Hungry Jacks Double Angry Angus and 35.7g and 2870kJ for the McDonald’s Mighty Angus, I am going to give these a very wide berth (so that I don’t have to be given a very wide berth).
If you Google “eating beef” you get about 15,900,000 results. That’s a lot.
If you Google “secondhelping” you only get about 294,000, but I am working on that.
Seriously though, we are obsessed with beef.
From why we should eat it,
Unnamed studies indicate that “if our ancestors had not eaten red meats, the brains of humans would be 1/4 of the present size”,
You could help fight climate change. Yes – I know, weren’t expecting that were you? Grass fed only though read here for more,
It has some good health benefits:
it is a good source of protein (important if you want a strong muscular body),
and vitamins B6 and B12,
if lean and/or organic its a good source of zinc (helps with building a healthy immune system and healing wounds),
it is rich in phosphorous (strong teeth and bones – you’ll need them to eat the beef I think) and in iron (carries oxygen in the blood and prevents fatigue).
Beef Jerky. This one came from me, not from any research. I love jerky and biltong.
To why we shouldn’t
You can feed 10 people with the grain that is used to feed a cow
For every gram of beef you don’t eat, litres of water are saved
Cattle fart – big time and produce a lot of methane as a result
Eating half a kilo of hamburger does the same damage as driving your car for more than three weeks
Grain fed cattle are treated no better than battery hens
Grain fed beef is at risk of many more bacterial problems (including ecoli)
Onto what breed it is,
At the 2009 Beef Australia Expo an amazing 33 breeds were entered for the Stud Cattle Competition. Some of them are well known breeds, like Angus Hereford and Murray Grey and some are the less recognised breeds that chefs seem to be taking a liking to, Belted Galloway, Limousins and Chianina. There is even a breed called Square Meaters!
What it was fed,
Grain fed beef
Has a lower nutritional value
Has been fed an unnatural diet
Causes stress on the animals
Contributes greatly to ground and water pollution
Grass Fed
Is lower in fat and calories
Provides more Omega-3 Fatty Acids
Contains more vitamins
Is kinder to animals and environment
And if it was aged and how.
Ageing can be described as the amount of time from slaughter until the carcass is broken down into retail cuts. Meat Standards Australia has a minimum 5 day ageing period before is can be sold to the consumer. Research has shown that ageing can improve eating quality. Naturally occuring enzymes breakdown the proteins that make up the muscle fibres resulting in more tender beef. Most improvement occurs in the first 21 days, but many restaurants who dry age their own beef do so for much longer.
Dry age? What’s that? There are two methods of ageing beef wet and dry. Dry ageing is done in a refrigerated cooler at a specific temperature and humidity. This concentrates the flavour as well as increasing the tenderness.
Wet ageing is done in vacuum-sealed plastic. This will improve the tenderness but you won’t get the concentration of beefy flavour.
All of these variables combine to determine what makes a particularly tasty piece of beef. But that too is subjective. An article in the SMH suggested “It’s a dangerous thing to criticise any cattle man or woman’s breed of choice – you’re much safer criticising their religion or even brand of ute…”
So, back to the Wagyu sausages. I think calling them Wagyu Beef sausages is a tautology since the “gyu” is Japanese for beef. The “wa” means Japanese. Wagyu is a breed of cattle native to Japan prized for it highly marbled beef. Lots of lovely monounsaturated fat between all the muscle. Its absorbed into the muscle when cooked and produces that melt in the mouth tenderness and flavour. Did you know Wagyu is graded? Not by sitting a literacy test or completing assignments. In Australia it given a marble score that ranges from 1 – 9+. The higher the score, the greater amount of fat, the better the quality and the higher the price. I’ve eaten some 9 score Wagyu at Aria and I can assure you it did melt in my mouth.
None of this matters much to my Coles snags though. In Australia labelling laws mean that only 50% of the content needs to be Wagyu for a product to be called Wagyu and there is no reference to the marble score. At $17.80 per kg for the snags, I doubt there’s much in there to get excited about when Wagyu porterhouse with a high marble score ranges from $100 per kg to $200 per kg.
I was keen to cook my Wagyu sausages, but had already started thinking about turning Cumulus Inc’s Spiced Cauliflower salad into a pasta for dinner (apologies to Andrew McConnell for adapting his dish in such a pedestrian way). So, I ended up adding the sausage meat to the dish. Here’s how I did it. Recipe serves 2.
Ingredients
2 of Coles Finest Wagyu Beef Sausages, casing removed and broken into little pieces
1/4 head cauliflower cut into small florets
1/2 cup roughly chopped parsley
1 small brown onion finely diced
1 clove garlic crushed and chopped
3 anchovy fillets, broken up
olive oil
1 birdseye chilli finely sliced
2 handsful rocket
cayenne pepper
2 tblsp chopped mint
few cherry tomatoes halved
short pasta of your choice – I used big fat spirals
shaved parmesan to finish
Method
Whenever I make a pasta dish, regardless of what it is, the very first thing I do is put the water on. That way I know it will be ready when I need it.
I cooked the cauliflower the way I saw them do it at Cumulus, on a hot pan until they show signs of browning, then finished on a tray in the oven. I steamed mine for a very short time first to bring out the moisture. I wanted the flavour from roasting but needed to make sure they didn’t dry out too much to still pair well with the pasta. They had about 2 minutes in the pan and 10 minutes in a medium hot oven.
Using the same pan I heated some olive oil over a medium heat and sauteed the onion, adding the broken up anchovies when the onion was beginning to get translucent. The idea of adding the anchovy, apart from the salty hit it brings to the dish, was from the classic Pugliese dish orecchiette con broccoli. You need to really crush the anchovies so that they melt into the olive oil.
Next in the pan was the garlic and the sausage. Stir frequently until sausage is cooked through.
By this stage the cauliflower should be ready, so remove it from the oven and sprinkle with cayenne. Add the cauliflower to the sausage mixture and mix through.
When the pasta is al dente, drain and serve into individual bowls. Add to each bowl some of the sausage mixture, chillies, chopped parsley, mint, rocket and cherry tomatoes.
Return contents of individual bowl to pan to combine and heat through.
Serve with shaved parmesan.
The pasta was quite nice. The Wagyu sausages did have a good flavour but were far from melt in the mouth. Rather a silly waste to put such a product into a sausage and no doubt misleads any Wagyu virgins out there as to what “the most tender, most succulent and tastiest meat in the world” should actually taste like. I think I will stick to my favourite butcher the next time I want sausages.
This did get me thinking though, about beef. I cannot give it up. I enjoy it to much for that and do believe it is good for you. What I will do is continue on my journey of committing to understand provenance and try to only buy beef if I know where’s it from and what it ate.
Disclaimer: I did quite a bit of reading for this post. Here are some of the sites I visited that helped contribute to the information above. This post represents my opinion based on what I have gleaned from this research but is meant to be interesting and informative, maybe even a little bit funny, not a defintitive source of facts.
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