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August 16th, 2018 by Joe Heitzeberg • Read 13,395 times • 2 min read
Rare. Delicious. Umami. Olive Wagyu, the world’s rarest beef, is back—and only Crowd Cow has it. In April, we offered Olive Wagyu for the first time ever in the United States and our extremely limited supply sold out quickly. Only a small amount of Olive Wagyu is available at a time because only a few farmers raise it. We’re thrilled to announce that we will be offering Olive Wagyu for the second time! Our Olive Wagyu special events are...
August 13th, 2018 by Joe Heitzeberg • Read 18,660 times • 1 min read
Spending time in Japan is pretty special to me, especially when I get to eat fantastic food prepared by the best chefs in the country. I just got back from a trip to Kagawa Prefecture to meet with our Olive Wagyu producers and the experience was phenomenal. One of the trip highlights was visiting Ichigo Steakhouse, the Olive Wagyu specialty grill in Takamatsu. Chef Mori-san grills over sumi and binchotan charcoal and is the only nose-to-tail...
April 12th, 2018 by Joe Heitzeberg • Read 14,855 times • 2 min read
A few years ago, Chef Mori was a chef at a Yakiniku House (a traditional Japanese beef grill) in Osaka when he first heard about Olive Wagyu: a rare Wagyu beef produced by feeding inawara rice straw, Italian rye grass, and toasted olive lees to Kuroge Washu cattle. It's only raised by a handful of producers in Japan and originated on a remote island called Shodoshima in Japan's smallest province. It piqued Chef Mori's interest, and would...
April 10th, 2018 by Joe Heitzeberg • Read 15,997 times • less than one min read
We created a handy infographic to answer all the questions you ever had about Olive Wagyu. Enjoy! You can read more about Olive Wagyu here.
April 3rd, 2018 by Joe Heitzeberg • Read 8,174 times • 1 min read
In October 2017, I met with Kagawa Prefecture's Governor and senior staff. Watch below or check out the transcript of my speech in Japanese, which outlined my journey from living on a farm homestay in Hokkaido 20 years ago to a current milestone: bringing Olive Wagyu from Japan to America. What follows is an explanation of how this came about in the first place. Soonafter we started Crowd Cow, friends and early customers asked, "will you...
March 28th, 2018 by Joe Heitzeberg • Read 19,865 times • 1 min read
If you’re a true steakophile, you might have heard of Kobe beef. But even if you’re extremely in the know when it comes to exquisite steak, you’ve probably never heard of Olive Wagyu. It’s a small-batch variety of steak produced only in the far reaches of Japan’s Kagawa Prefecture, and raised on a diet of caramelized pressed olives. It takes the insane marbling of Japanese beef, delivers even higher-than-normal levels of healthy...
March 5th, 2018 by Joe Heitzeberg • Read 96,892 times • 2 min read
What is this “Wagyu” we’re talking about? Let me break it down for you. There are four breeds of “Wagyu” -- Japanese cattle, that is -- that are indigenous to Japan. One of them, Kuroge Washu, is genetically predisposed to high levels of marbling. It’s really hard to get authentic Wagyu 100% from the Kuroge Washu breed directly from Japan. But we didn’t just source authentic Wagyu from this Pacific Rim nation. We sniffed out the rarest of...
November 7th, 2017 by Joe Heitzeberg • Read 119,500 times • 8 min read
And what are you missing out on if it's the only brand of Japanese beef you know? The term “Kobe Beef” is one of the most famous — almost mythical -- terms in the world of food. It’s also one of the most misunderstood and misused. Outside of Japan, the phrase “Kobe Beef” has become almost synonymous with “Japanese beef” or “Wagyu”, but it's not that simple. Let's break it down. Wagyu = "Japanese beef" Wagyu is just a word that means...
November 7th, 2017 by Joe Heitzeberg • Read 47,542 times • 1 min read
It's the Olympic Games you've never heard of. Since 1966, Japan's beef industry has held a nationwide competition every five years to crown the best beef in the country. It's called Zenkoku Wagyu Noryku Kyoshin-kai (全国和牛能力共進会) but it's known also as "The Wagyu Olympics." There are 11 prize categories, one of the more interesting of which measures the quality of the fats (looking for things like the health-promoting and umami-generating oleic...
July 10th, 2017 by Joe Heitzeberg • Read 49,045 times • 4 min read
Crowd Cow broke into the innermost chambers of the Japanese beef world to become America's first-ever direct sourcer-seller of A5 Wagyu from Japan. Here's the story of how we did it. There are not a lot of people out there who have tried Japanese A5 Wagyu. But if someone you know has tried it, you've probably heard about it, in the form of happy ranting and raving. And as you can probably tell from the photo below, this is not the steak most...
