Economy Size Geek

What happens when you combine foodies with the scientific method - a taste off. In this case, we focused exclusively on meat - Ribeye steaks specifically.

I brought together 5 other friends to see - can you really tell the difference between very fancy steak and bog standard.

Basic overview - there were five kinds of steak. They were all ribeyes. They were all approximately the same weight (The largest being 14 oz - the grassfed was the smallest with 2 5oz steaks). There was a great variance in the thickness ( The thinest being the standard at about .5 in and the thickest being the prime at 1 inch)

The Kinds Of Meat

American Kobe Beef (Wagyu) This was sourced online from Allen Brothers. They don’t specifically talk about it on their site but it seems that the meat is most likely a hybrid of Japanese cattle and American Angus cows. This was the most expensive meat in the tasting at $92 per pound.

Heart Brand Beef - Akuashi Beef They make it very clear that their herd is completely pure breed Japanese cattle. The meat was sourced from Heart Braand Beef in Hardwood Texas. The meat was the second most expensive at $60 per pound. (I also got some stir fry and hot dogs from them that weren’t super expensive - my guess is that they focus on the steak cuts and are just trying to find a home for the rest of the cow).

HEB Prime 1 Select This is the top tier steak available at HEB. According to the store, only the top 2% of all U.S. Beef can carry the designation. It is also aged for a minimum of 14 days. It cost #13 per pound.

Grass Fed This from a cow that is pastured and raised purely on grass. My original source fell through so my brother brought over some meat from Bastrop Cattle Company I’m not sure what their price was, but I found a ranch in Granger that sold grass fed and finished beef for $13 per pound.

Standard Choice HEB This steak was just wrapped and available in the meat section of the grocery store. It was the only steak we tried that still had a bone attached. It was $8 per pound.

Preparation

To keep things fair, none of the guests knew which steak was which at any time. I handled all of the meat, and after I started chopping it up even I didn’t really know any more.

The Wagyu and Akuashi steaks were thawed in the fridge. All steaks were brought to room temperature. The steaks were all patted dry with paper towels. I then rubbed some salt and pepper into them and covered them in olive oil. That was it.

I fired the grill up. My infrared side got to about 875F. I got the center grates to 650F and I kept the third section at a lower temperature (Which I can’t remember). All the steaks were cooked to be medium rare (Though it erred more towards the rare side). I seared the normal steaks using the infrared and then cooked then for a few minutes on the middle grate. The Japanese steaks are more sensitive to heat so I cooked them on the lower temperature setting.

Judging

Each steak was cut into six portions. A toothpick of a different color was put into the steak to denote its identity. The key that mapped which steak was which color was kept in a different room and was not revealed until after the judging.

The steaks were judged on appearance, texture, beef flavor, and happiness. Each one was stack ranked from 1 to 5. Meaning a judge could only have a single steak with a 1 for each category. At the end we totaled up the score for each steak for each judge. The lowest score was considered the winner.

The Results

Conclusions

The judges had a hard time determining which was worse the Grass Fed or the HEB standard. This was likely caused by the fact that the Grass Fed cut was not very good.

The other thing we ran into was that the top two choices seemed to be between Prime and either Wagyu or Akuashi. In some cases, the judges had to just pick because they were very very close. You will also notice that each judge picked only one of the Japanese steaks. No one put them both as the top two.

The tasting could have been improved by getting cuts that more closely resembled each other in size and thickness. This may be the source of some inconsistency since each judge was only eating a small part of a larger steak it is possible that they didn’t get the best part of the steak. Another factor could have been aging. I do not think either of the Japanese steaks were aged in any way. I would love to take some time and compare aged Akuashi to aged Prime to see what impact it has on flavor.

This entire project started because I had Akuashi at Bohannon’s downtown. It was without a doubt the best steak I’ve ever eaten. The test we ran seems to show that the great meat itsn’t enough to replicate the experience. I’m not sure if that means aging, temperature of cooking or other additives.

At some point I’m going back to Bohannon’s to see if I can replicate the experience. In the mean time, I’m going back to buying HEB Prime as my default steak. It is seriously less expensive, easier to get (no shipping), and bite for bite gave the Japanese steaks a run for their money.