Tag Archives: beef

The Most Overrated And The Most Underrated Cuts of Beef.

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Meat is the most expensive thing that most people buy at the supermarket. Unfortunately, most people don’t know how to judge meat, and as a result, they wind up buying meat simply on the basis of its appearance. In other words, people buy steaks that look pretty. That is why the prettiest steaks are usually the most expensive ones. However, there is no correlation between a steak’s attractiveness and it’s flavor.

filet-mignonThe most overrated: Filet mignon. When professional chefs are asked what cut of beef is most overrated, they invariably name filet mignon. It is usually the most expensive cut of meat in most butcher shops and on restaurant menus. Admittedly, a filet mignon is pretty. It looks nice. It is round and symmetrical, and it is super tender. You can cut a filet mignon with a fork. The reason that filet mignon is so tender is that it is a non-working muscle. The cow doesn’t use it. Because it is a non-working muscle, filet mignon has very little marbling. While a filet mignon is very tender, it also has very little flavor.

The most underrated: Chuck. Chuck is very versatile cut and has a lot of flavor. Nevertheless, it is always one of the cheapest cuts of meat in the supermarket. I often see it on sale at Safeway for under $2 a pound. Chuck is cheap because there’s a lot of it on a cow, it’s not pretty, and most people don’t know how to use it. Chuck roast is the ideal cut of beef for pot roast and daube. Daube is a classic French beef stew. It made with chuck, vegetables, herbs, and wine. You can find lots of good recipes for chuck on the Food Network web site.
 

Kobe Beef. The Most Counterfeited Food in America.

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What percentage of the Kobe beef sold in the United States is fake? Answer: 100%. All of the Kobe beef sold in the U.S. is fake – but – how can that be? They sell Kobe beef in spiffy supermarkets and butcher shops all over the U.S., plus it’s on the menus of hundreds of restaurants, including many well-known, high-priced steakhouses. There are 6 restaurants just here in the San Francisco bay area with the word ‘Kobe’ in the name of the restaurant itself. There are over a dozen restaurants just in Berkeley that sell Kobe hamburgers and Kobe hot dogs. Lots of Kobe beef is also sold on the internet. You can buy a ‘Kobe Waygu Beef Extravaganza’ from Amazon. It contains 5.5 pounds of steak and costs $518. The most extravagant thing about this ‘beef extravaganza’ is its price, beacuse it too contains no real Kobe beef. How can all this Kobe beef be fake? The answer is simple: Kobe beef is not sold in the United States.

‘Kobe beef’ is a legally controlled and trademarked name. In order for a steak to be genuine Kobe beef, it must have come from a cow that was raised and slaughtered in Hyogo Prefecture in Japan, where the city of Kobe is located; however, none of the slaughterhouses in Hyogo are approved or inspected by the USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture.) As a result, it is illegal to import Kobe beef into the United States. American tourists visiting Japan sometimes try to sneak Kobe beef into the U.S. in their luggage, but it is routinely confiscated by U.S. Customs agents.

Real Kobe beef costs $300 to $500 a pound in Japan. The stuff called ‘Kobe beef’ that you see in U.S. butcher shops usually sells for $30 to $50 a pound. That is a pretty good indication right there that the stuff is fake. Most of the so-called Kobe beef sold in the U.S. is actually Waygu or Angus beef, neither of which costs as much as real Kobe beef. Angus beef typically sells for $7 to $14 a pound. The Japanese government and the producers of Kobe beef have tried for decades to get the U.S. government to crack down on the sale of counterfeit Kobe beef, but to no avail. Nobody knows how much fake Kobe beef is sold in the U.S. The one thing that we know for sure is that no real Kobe beef is sold in the United States.