Beef I Got Angus Go Nowhere Without Stainless
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The Founder of Beecher's Cheese thinks beef is the next arts and crafts food
By Joe Heitzeberg - Co-founder and CEO of Crowd Cow. I'chiliad on Instagram at @jheitzeb.
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Beer. Coffee. Chocolate. Cheese. These keystones of the craft nutrient revolution have given u.s.a. some of the well-nigh easily-recognized emblems of craft, from armies of microbreweries to rainforest-certified cacao truffles to a widespread ability to distinguish Arabica from Robusta. At present Seattle's king of craft food, Kurt Beecher Dammeier, thinks beef is the next food in line for a arts and crafts transformation.
(I of the photos I snapped of Mishima Reserve beef, at the "steak-off" Dammeier and I held. A story for some other time.)
SHOP: 100% Grass-fed, Grass-finished craft beef
No hormones, no unnecessary antibiotics. Dry out-aged beef.
"At that place's no doubt in my mind that grass-fed beefiness is the Hefeweizen and Wagyu is the IPA of artisan beef," Dammeier says equally he gestures toward the Wagyu-stocked butcher counter in the entry of his South Lake Union steakhouse, The Butcher'due south Table.
Comparisons like these coil off Dammeier's
Image credit to Sugar Mountain
In the mid-nineties, a handful of years before the doors of his Thruway Place Market phenom Beecher's Cheese opened, Kurt Dammeier accidentally became a beer man.
"I had already figured out that craft beers tasted improve, only I wasn't a beer geek."
He insists, "I really wasn't looking to go into beer."
Simply one solar day, he received a phone telephone call from a friend savvy in the stock market, letting him know that an upstart Seattle-based beer company called Pyramid Brewing Co. looked similar a promising investment. Already on the hunt for just such an investment opportunity, Dammeier channeled his "mini corporate raider" side.
He chuckles, "I bought 20% of the stock earlier they even knew information technology."
Dammeier then allow Pyramid'due south leadership in on the undercover, and speedily got rolling on recasting the board and bringing in a new CEO. He wanted to help Pyramid continue paving the way for more compelling, interesting, and better-tasting beers. And it worked -- both for Pyramid and the beer marketplace writ large.
While the Pyramid Hefeweizen was challenge gold at the Great American Beer Festival, the grocery store beer aisle was exploding into the state of milk and pilsners it is today. Dammeier had demonstrated a talent for getting in on the front of craftification.
Simply a few years afterward, he had virtually the aforementioned experience with cheese, opening Seattle landmark Beecher'southward well the expansion and stinkification of the QFC cheese alley. (When his handmade artisan cheese was first sold at Seattle grocery stores in the early on 2000s, he laments, "The next best thing in the aisle was Jarlsberg.")
The cafe menu board at Throughway Place Market'south famous Beecher's Handmade Cheese
Dammeier claims his craft-nutrient hunchmaking process is half economical analysis and one-half art.
"There are curves and natural ways [each market] evolves," he explains. Just at the end of the 24-hour interval, it comes downwardly to what his gut tells him.
Five years ago, Dammeier says, "I could feel that beef was starting to catch on." He pauses, searching for the right comparison. "If the beer business was in the eighth inning, and cheese was in the sixth inning, beefiness was in the second."
That was apparently good enough. Dammeier went all in and bought an Angus-cantankerous-Wagyu beef company called Mishima Reserve, a beef brand (not a farm) that does not heighten their ain animals, and decided to open a steakhouse where he could have full transparency "from the gleam in the bull's eye to the plate."
It was an unusual move for the world of steakhouses, whose usual accent isn't on de-obfuscation of sourcing, simply on other qualities like dry-aging and USDA prime grades. Simply transparency was only role of what it ways for a nutrient to be craft, and Dammeier wasn't done.
If you peruse the Butcher's Table bill of fare, you lot'll meet information technology features exclusively Wagyu-Angus cross beef -- "Wangus" -- a beef that is like in taste to Angus beef, but because of a percentage of crossbreeding with Wagyu Deoxyribonucleic acid, tin can achieve boosted marbling levels similar to USDA prime in some cases.
But don't exist confused by the Japanese-sounding name and utilize of Japanese language characters in the branding and on the menu -- this is not Japanese beef from Japan, nor is it the rare and special purebred or fullblood Wagyu that is produced by an exceedingly rare specialist breeders in this USA. Butcher's Table and Mishima Reserve is non pure Wagyu -- it's "Wangus" a crossbreed of Angus with an unspecified level of Wagyu DNA, an increasingly common beef varietal that tastes like Angus and can reach USDA prime marbling levels. Now is "Mishima Reserve" a farm. They do not heighten animals, but rather source them from many farms as calves earlier moving them to a feedlot for finishing on a grain-based diet.
The Butcher'south Table in South Lake Union, Seattle
And at only 8-oz portions, Butcher's Tabular array steaks are cut way smaller than normal -- it'south not your Outback Steakhouse fare past whatever stretch of the imagination. He compares the thinking behind his Mishima Reserve beef to what happened when beer went arts and crafts.
"It'due south college quality, and there's less of information technology."
Dammeier sees all these factors -- smaller portion sizes, exotic breeds, and transparency -- as some of the touchstones of craft beef. And as for where he thinks craft beef is going adjacent?
"Grass-fed and Wagyu are correct at the eye of the beefiness movement."
He's not wrong. Over the past several years, retail sales of grass-fed beef have been growing at an incredible rate of 25-xxx% per year. And involvement in Japanese and American Wagyu has skyrocketed recently, besides, with many more than restaurants offering Wagyu-cross beef, and involvement in A5 Wagyu imported directly from Japan expanding quickly as well.
When you talk to Dammeier, you get the sense you're in the presence of a arts and crafts-food fortune teller. He leaves me with a tantalizing hope.
"If y'all look dorsum x years from now, the beef category will look very different than information technology does today."
Shop: 100% Grass-fed, Grass-finished craft beef
No hormones, no unnecessary antibiotics. Dry-aged beefiness.
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Source: https://www.crowdcow.com/blog/the-founder-of-beechers-cheese-thinks-beef-is-the-next-craft-food
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