Are Wagyu Burgers Worth The Money?

We took a beautiful, 3.5-pound, award- winning A5 Iwate Wagyu steak and did the unthinkable. We ground it up to make prohibitively expensive and ludicrous burgers.

While grinding A5 wagyu to make burgers feels criminal, claiming you sell a specific brand of wagyu when you don’t is actually criminal.

A 2016 Inside Edition expose allegedly caught two famed restaurants, Le Bernadin and Old Homestead selling mislabeled Kobe beef on their menus. Larry Olmsted, author of Real Food Fake Food, says if you see a Kobe slider on a menu, it’s almost certainly a fake.

“So if I if I see Kobe burger, I just assume it’s total B.S. because you’re not that’s never going to be real, he said. “I took a look at some restaurant menus from reliable places that have really five Japanese wagyu and it’s already $45 dollars an ounce for this meat. Right. So. Right. That would make a burger $180 before you pay for the bun.”

Wagyu has two signifiers, a letter and a number. The letter relates to yield, or the amount of edible meat compared to the total weight of the cow. The yield for our burger is rated A, which means that at least 72 percent of the weight was edible. Yield is typically important to producers.

But for us, the eaters, the number is more important. The numbers, which range from 1 to 5, relates to the fat quality, color, texture and how evenly the fat is dispersed throughout the meat.

We are going to be trying three 10-ounce burgers. Up first is Porterhouses’ house blend of Prime beef. Second is an American Wagyu made from a 23-ounce Snake River Farms New York strip steak. The last contender is an 11-time champion called A5 Iwate Wagyu. Sorry but the wagyu burgers are not on the menu.

Each burger is seasoned with salt and served plain on a sesame bun. Because of their high fat content, the American and wagyu burgers will be cooked in a ripping hot cast iron pan. Porterhouse’s signature burger will be cooked over an open flame.

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