Sanuki, or “olive” wagyu, is regarded by some as the rarest beef on the planet and renowned for its award-winning fat quality. The cattle raised to make this beef feed on olive pulp, leftover from local olive oil production on the island of Shodoshima in Japan. Their meat, as a result, is high in a healthy fat called oleic acid that gives it a unique texture and flavor.

This hard-to-find cut of beef just went on sale in the United States for the very first time, thanks to Crowd Cow. We were able to get our hands on a couple of steaks early to see how they tasted.

The Marbling

You can tell right off the bat that the marbling inside is gorgeous and pronounced. There wasn’t any part of the steak that didn’t have multiple streaks of fat running through it, and it almost felt more like a solid piece of butter than it did a cut of meat.

Cooking The Steak

Because the cattle this meat came from was fed on olive pulp, I opted for a neutral olive oil to cook the steak in to accentuate, rather than mask, the flavors coming from the beef fat. You don’t want to add more than a teaspoon to the pan, because Sanuki wagyu renders out a ton of oleic acid, a primary component of olive oil. Thus, it’ll start swimming in grease fast if you’re not paying attention to how much the steak renders. Make sure to save some of that oil, though, because basting this steak is key to cooking it to the right temperature.

The Taste

Everyone in the office who tried a piece of this steak was blown away by how it tasted. Even for those who’d tried wagyu before, the flavor stood out. Whereas normal wagyu steak can be heavy and fatty on the palate, nearly everybody described this beef as “cleaner” in terms of taste and finish. It still had the melt-in-your-mouth texture associated with wagyu, and the actual flavor of the beef was about as pure as you can imagine. But that oleic acid from the olive pulp the cows eat makes a subtle but clear difference in the taste that differentiates it from the typical wagyu, making it worth a taste just for the comparison alone.

Crowd Cow’s sale will open up to the general public on April 17th, where any Sanuki olive wagyu left from the member-exclusive sale will be sold.