Japanese beef fattens Texas ranchers’ pockets
Cattlemen’s profitable new niche produces $50-a-pound steak cuts
HARWOOD — Visitors to the spacious HeartBrand Ranch in prime Gonzales County cattle country are greeted by the Johnny Appleseed of beef.
There in the ranch office stands the full taxidermied remains of Big Al. In his 15 years of life, mostly spent in Texas, Big Al sired so many offspring at the ranch and around the world that much of the breed outside of Japan can be genetically traced to him.
The 2,000-pound bull came from a prized lineage of Akaushi, a Japanese breed. He was the first purebred Akaushi bull born outside of Japan when his mother, Akiko, gave birth to him on Jan. 27, 1995, in Wisconsin.
How many descendants can this mac daddy claim?
“I can’t say with certainty that it would be a majority, but the number would have to be well into the thousands,” said JoJo Carrales, HeartBrand’s vice president of cattle operations. “We have full-blooded (Wagyu) cattle in Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela with Al’s genetics.”
The arrival of Big Al her-
alded a new trend in cattle ranching and dining. Wagyu beef has exploded in popularity, both regionally and globally, and is a growing presence on menus and in the local meat case.
It’s turned this very Japanese meat into a profitable new niche for Texas cattlemen, with customers who don’t seem to mind paying upward of $50 a pound for gourmet steak cuts. Texas is thought to be the biggest producer of this exclusive beef, with a growing list of area ranchers converting their herds to Wagyu through selective breeding.
Akaushi, also called Japanese Brown or Japanese Red, is one of four breeds — including Japanese Black, Japanese Polled and Japanese Shorthorn — under the Wagyu beef label (“Wa” means Japanese and “gyu” means cow). The U.S. leads the world in the breeding and production of Wagyu from Japanese Black herds that are raised around the country and in Akaushi, bred mostly in Texas.
Texas ranchers also are profiting from selling straws of semen, priced at $20 to $4,000 per straw, from prized Akaushi bulls to customers around the world.
Wagyu meat is known for its deep red coloring and a rich, intensely flavored fatty marbling. Unlike traditional American beef cattle that develop a fat cap over fairly lean muscle, Wagyu breeds create layers of fat that weave through the inside of the muscle like an underground ant colony — a characteristic that purportedly makes Wagyu a hearthealthier alternative to traditional U.S. beef.
That fat renders into the muscle as it cooks, creating super juicy steaks and brisket and earning Wagyu the nickname “butter beef.”
San Antonio chefs such as Mark Bohanan (Bohanan’s Prime Steaks & Seafood) and William “Goro” Pitchford (Godai Sushi Bar & Restaurant) proudly feature the meat, and barbecue spots are getting in on the trend as well, selling Wagyu brisket.
Pitchford finds the Wagyu sirloin and New York strip cuts to be so pure, he serves them sliced raw and paper-thin as a sashimi special.
“I’ll never forget my first taste of it,” he said. “Everybody likes to say something ‘melts in your mouth,’ but with this meat, it really does. I compare it a lot to foie gras.” How it began
In the 1860s, beef from the Kobe region of Japan was shipped to various ports for consumption, and Japanese cattle producers started to crossbreed with European and Asian cattle. Those experiments yielded the Wagyu breeds.
“The Japanese are the ones that did all the hard work. None of us can take credit for that,” said Jordan Beeman, president of HeartBrand Beef. “They created animals with marbling that can’t be found anywhere else in the world.”
Japan banned the export of its prized cattle, but that didn’t reduce the world’s curiosity and hunger for the exotic breeds. In 1976, four bulls — two Japanese Black and two Akaushi — arrived in the U.S. to breed with cattle here, the first step in establishing an American Wagyu bloodline.
Akiko, Big Al’s mama, was part of a group of eight Akaushi cows and three bulls that entered the U.S. in a specially equipped Boeing 747 airliner in 1994 thanks to a group of wily Texas ranchers exploiting a loophole in the export ban. Those animals were bred to start a herd that was eventually purchased in its entirety by Jordan and Ronald Beeman, creating HeartBrand Beef in 2006. Building the herd
Cows and bulls don’t breed like rabbits — not even the prolific Big Al — so it took more than 25 years of deliberate breeding to distill the cross-bred bloodlines to as close to pure Wagyu as possible. Even so, the total cattle numbers remain low enough that they aren’t even charted by the U.S. beef industry.
“When you are killing 28 million head of cattle per year, the Wagyu portion of that doesn’t even register as a blip,” said Joe Paschal, a livestock specialist and expert in animal breeding at Texas A&M University. “But Texas is the biggest cattle producer with the most numbers, most breeds, most ranches, and we are No. 1 in production. I would suspect we are primary source for this line of beef, too.”
HeartBrand currently manages a herd of more than 14,000 full-blooded Akaushi. About 800 head are kept on the 1,600-acre ranch for breeding and calving, while the others are moved to the Panhandle or other parts of the country and put on feed.
“We are by far the largest operation in Texas and probably the second-largest Wagyu provider in the country,” Jordan Beeman said. “I think in the longterm game, we have more potential than grass-fed beef. Grass-fed beef fills an emotional need; people aren’t necessarily eating it because it tastes great. Our focus is to provide a toprate beef-eating experience.” Paying the price
High-end cuts of Wagyu regularly retail for $50 or more per pound, and whole briskets can carry a $200 price tag. That’s about a 400 percent markup from current prices for traditional choice beef cuts, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture reports. But there is a big reason for that.
Like beauty contestant judges, USDA inspectors give their top prime rating to beef that’s almost perfect: hearty meat from a young (20 to 24 months), well-fed animal that has deep red meat laced with marbling. Beeman says that out of the 25,482 Akaushi cattle that have been processed by HeartBrand since 2013, 39 percent of it was graded prime, and 57 percent was graded choice, the next best.
Only about 2 percent of traditional U.S. beef earns a prime rating.
Bohanan might have been the first local chef to offer the beef in his acclaimed Bohanan’s Prime Steaks & Seafood restaurant in San Antonio in 2003. It has remained a menu staple ever since.
“We would showcase it to customers on a tray, their eyes would light up, and they were quick to say ‘I want that,’ ” Bohanan said.
Wagyu has also started to infiltrate the barbecue scene, with at least two San Antonio-area restaurants, Black Board Bar B Q in Sisterdale and Smoke Shack on Broadway, offering Wagyu brisket for $24 per pound.
“I get a laugh out of the customers that ask for lean cuts” of Wagyu, Black Board co-owner Jake Gandolfo said. “It has so much fat, that’s impossible. But I get it. It’s still an unfamiliar product to a lot of folks. I try to make a point to watch them take that first taste, though. You can tell that it’s the best bite of brisket they’ve ever had in their life.”
So what happened to Big Al?
He met his doom in 2010 when he broke into a pen of 30 2-year-old bulls. Carrales said that after he “whooped up a few of them,” the young bulls — most of them his descendants — ganged up on Al and killed him.
“It probably wasn’t as dramatic as the end of ‘300,’ but what a way to go,” Carrales said.
And through the power of genetic science, he’s still making Little Als all over the world.