Wagyu - Japanese beef

What is Wagyu?

Wagyu is the flavoursome Japanese beef with the characteristic fine marbling throughout the meat. Wagyu's marbling contributes to the legendary melt in your mouth texture and is sought by chefs the worldover because of its depth of flavour and tenderness.

Strictly speaking, wagyu is a breed of Japanese cattle with bloodlines traceable to Japan. Australia received it's first wagyu genetics in 1990 and is now a large exporter of wagyu cattle to Japan.

Wagyu for good health

“The flavours in the fat”. Just ask any chef worth his toque and this will be his mantra. Juicy, tasty, delicious fat, that’s what wagyu is full of. We are not talking about the artery clogging subcutaneous fat that you should diligently trim from the outside of each serve of meat, we are talking about the delicious monounsaturated variety in the form of oleic and linoleic acid that my doctor tells me to choke down with gusto.

This ‘healthy’ fat is distributed throughout the muscle and melts at a much lower temperature than regular cattle fat, enhancing the flavour and tenderness in the meat. It’s good to know you can have a break from mercury filled salmon and still enjoy the health benefits of good fat.

Wagyu in Australia - F1 to fullblood

So if it’s from Australia shouldn’t it be called Gogyu?

OK, back in the 1990’s while we were listening to the very best music produced in any decade, some smart cookies brought some wagyu cattle over from Japan and started to cross breed with some good old Aussie Angus. To distinguish the ability of this new breed of cattle which produces the highest percentage of tasty, juicy intramuscular monounsaturated fat in Australia, these cattle are referred to as Wagyu. In fact depending on how much Japanese blood runs through each animal's veins, they are referred to as Wagyu F1 – F4. See below:

F1 = Full-blooded Wagyu + Angus hence 50/50
F2 = F1 + full-blooded Wagyu hence 75/25
F3 = F2 + full-blooded Wagyu
F4 = F3 + full-blooded Wagyu is also known as pure bred

Fullblood wagyu however must be from both Bull and Cow with 100% Japanese bloodlines on both sides.

Generally speaking the higher the Japanese bloodline the higher marble score can be achieved.
In Japan anything less than fullblood cannot be called wagyu but is labelled as F1, Australian beef, NZ beef. And Kobe beef is simply wagyu but bred in Kobe, Japan.

Although the purists may thumb their noses at mere F1’s it is a very interesting fact that F1 is the largest selling type of beef in Japan with only the wealthy and high end restaurants buying anything higher than this.