Enter their ZIP code and we'll make sure the cuts you want to give are available in their area.
August 13th, 2018 by Joe Heitzeberg • Read 17,917 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 14,203 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 15,642 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 7,879 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 19,002 times • 1 min read
If youâre a true steakophile, you might have heard of Kobe beef. But even if youâre extremely in the know when it comes to exquisite steak, youâve probably never heard of Olive Wagyu. Itâs a small-batch variety of steak produced only in the far reaches of Japanâs 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 94,494 times • 2 min read
What is this âWagyuâ weâre talking about? Let me break it down for you. There are four breeds of âWagyuâ -- Japanese cattle, that is -- that are indigenous to Japan. One of them, Kuroge Washu, is genetically predisposed to high levels of marbling. Itâs really hard to get authentic Wagyu 100% from the Kuroge Washu breed directly from Japan. But we didnât just source authentic Wagyu from this Pacific Rim nation. We sniffed out the rarest of...
November 7th, 2017 by Joe Heitzeberg • Read 117,862 times • 8 min read
And what are you missing out on if it's the only brand of Japanese beef you know? The term âKobe Beefâ is one of the most famous â almost mythical -- terms in the world of food. Itâs also one of the most misunderstood and misused. Outside of Japan, the phrase âKobe Beefâ has become almost synonymous with âJapanese beefâ or âWagyuâ, 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 46,672 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 (ĺ ¨ĺ˝ĺçč˝ĺĺ ąé˛äź) 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 48,096 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...
