Guga: "this feels wrong. it's too expensive. you shouldn't do this" Also Guga: *dry ages 32oz A5 wagyu ribeye in mashed potatoes and fiberglass*

Thanks for having me Ethan, A5 Wagyu is something special and just like everything good in life having too much of it is not a good idea. But, WOW it is the best of the best for sure.

I actually tried part of what I'm pretty sure was a real wagyu burger (though almost definitely not A5) when I visited Kobe a few years back. It actually didn't use ground beef, but instead used thin slices, almost flakes of beef shaped into a patty specifically so it wouldn't just melt apart.

The music selection during the burger prep section is just... *chef's kiss*

When Wagyu Burgers first became a thing, my culinarily inclined friend (he doesn't like the term chef as he dropped out of culinary school and holds the term in high regard) basically railed against it, pointing out that Wagyu's draw was its incredible marbling but with ground beef you can already control the fat content and distribution, meaning you'd be wasting good cuts of steaks for little benefit.

Recently saw a restaurant menu in America that said you can upgrade your steak to "Wagyu" for only $10 more. It was a red flag in seeing it be so cheap, thanks to Ethan we know better

New subscriber here. Just found you. Endlessly appreciate your content. Thanks for doing the hard work.

Another very informative video 👍👍

I'm a butcher in Australia here. I often tell my customers that the mincer (meat grinder) is the great equaliser. It doesn't really matter the grade of the meat that goes in because fat is the only real determining factor in the flavour of mince (ground beef).

I worked for a meat company that delivered to all the finest restaurants in Seattle. The high end ones ordered the A5, the lower end ones ordered the Australian. If you go to a fancy steak house, ask them to show you the Japanese A5 certificate that comes with every case of beef. We had to provide copys of it to the restaurants even if they didnt order the whole case.

Such a simple recipe! I finally bought a wok this week. This will be the first meal I make with it. Thank you!

Super interesting and informative.

I used to work for Burgerim back in 2016. We had a “wagyu” burger (slider in all honesty) that you could order for an extra $2. I was super excited about the burger until I tried it in comparison to the regular beef and didn’t taste much a difference, so I looked into it. The company put in 10% USA wagyu beef into the burgers for a crazy up charge to the customers. Marketing like that should be criminal

isn't 'wagyu' kind of like 'parmesan'? Unless it's Parmigiana Reggiano, it's not what you really want. It's crass marketing that preys on the fact that many people don't notice the difference between (perceived) excellence and mediocrity.

Great video man!!🎉🎉🎉

Excellent video!

I lived in Japan for a long time, and they often have Wagyu burgers here. They all make it differently, but they always have one thing in common: They never have a thin patty You should never do the smash method on these, as once you smash them, all the fat is out of the patty. You want to make a thick(3cm or more) patty, grill it in low heat and thoroughly cook the inside, then use high heat to create a crust outside.

I think if anyone wants to use an A5 steak in a burger, you can still do it - just don't grind the meat. Just cook it as a medium rare steak and put it between the buns - you won't need to worry about the meat being chewy. A true A5 wagyu (especially if you use rib eye like you did in the video) is so melt in your mouth that you can cut it with a chopstick at room temperature. Horses for courses - regular American beef used for burger patties uses far chewier beef so they grind it. But A5 wagyu (of any cut) is simply different.

To me you're the vsauce but with food. I gets to watch cooking and food videos but at the same time i learn alot. Im so glad to have found this channel.

Awesome to see you working with GUGA!! One of the best Channels for Steak aficianados on YT.

THANK YOU! I raise wagyu cattle with my mother and sister, and we have legitimate fullblood Wagyu. It's gotten to the point where we can't even sell the beef at a profit due to their genetics being so expensive and the inability to produce at a large enough scale to supply a single restaurant. Being able to compete with some of these "american wagyu" company like Snake River farms is impossible, and yet people buy them just because they have the big word "WAGYU" on the front of the package. I wish there were a way to bring it up to the FDA or something that there should be a restriction on how they market their beef. I really appreciate you bringing awareness to this topic!!!

The only flaw that I can see this for more accurate testing was the spacing in the grilling. The rendered fat from each of the test subjects was intermingling with each other being so close (potentially issues with cross contamination in a sense). Other than that, really good experiment!

Guga has a great personality for the camera! the way he hopped on the episode and was able to hold his space and keep the momentum going dude is great

This was an excellent video. Intelligently done, and everything video was on point! Well done, sir. Please consider trying grass fed longhorn burgers. Best ever.

Guga is so humble on the expensive ingredients. Although himself, like you said in the video, maybe the most wagyu eaten guy in the world, he still treated it like a treasure.

This is why they take geographical indications and stuff so seriously in Europe. People laugh in the US about not being able to call sparkling wine champagne, but having serious regulations about what you can and cant call stuff is really important for maintaining the quality and cultural heritage of all kinds of really incredible foods.

that whyfiles opening sound track is a nice touch lol

Loved it when you talk about the difference between meat & bun and full made burger

Also worth mentioning is that 和牛 (wagyuu) isn't a single breed in Japan; there are four major varieties. One of these are the 黒毛和種 (Japanese black) which are used for Kobe beef among other local specialty beef, then there's 日本短角和種 (Japanese Shorthorn), 無角和種 (Japanese Polled), and 褐毛和種 (Japanese Red/Brown). But since nurture plays just as big a part as nature when it comes to Japanese beef, there will be a noticeable difference between, say, one of the top three regional varieties (Matsusaka, Oomi, and Kobe) and some other famous one, such as Yonezawa, even though all four are Japanese black. Then even within one of these regional varieties (say, Kobe or Matusaka beef) there will be a lot of different tiers (the gradings mentioned in the video) based off of the end result which in turn depends on their diets, if they've been massaged, etc. So IMO the breed itself is pretty small selling point. It's like trying to sell a cheap Chinese smartphone for the same price as a Samsung or iPhone phone just because it's also made from silicon, aluminum, copper, etc while disregarding the whole production process. Proper wagyuu is fine as a very small properly prepared piece in an izakaya in Kobe, Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto or whatever during a holiday; but non-Japanese wagyuu or exported wagyuu is just a marketing grift/gimmick to make gullible wealthy people fork out obscene amounts of money for something that doesn't warrant it. Just buy a good cut of local fresh beef from a decent butcher instead.

Not the collab I would have ever expected, but a welcome surprise for sure!

This was honestly a very interesting watch It also made me want to learn to cook meats better (and hungry)

There is a reason that the Wagyu fat melts away so much more quickly and thoroughly than fat from regular beef. You mentioned the difference in fat percentage but did not mention that the fat is chemically different also. Wagyu has a much higher monounsaturated fat content than regular beef, which has mostly saturated fat. Monounsaturated fat is usually liquid at room temp (think olive oil) and saturated fat is usually solid at room temp (think butter).

Wouldn't the wagyu fat that melted next to prime burger affected the flavour? It definitely "travelled" a bit

Guga deserves all the respect in the world. The amount of experimentation he does to improve public knowledge about steak is really admirable. Not only does he publish things that are very interesting to learn about, but the content itself is very entertaining especially if you're someone like me that enjoys watching food videos while eating.

In my quest for the best burger ever, Ethan once noted "use 70/30" beef, which is not readily available. Just yesterday I bought one of those shrink wrapped "waygu" beef packages because it was the only way to get the fat content up from 80/20. Haven't tried it yet. Your video is timely.

Man, it is so wholesome seeing Guga and Ethan in the same video. Y'all are both amazing people with such great channels.

I am glad they are being very honest and just say it is not worth it. And that the difference will get lost when the rest of the burger ingredients get added.

I used to get the high fat ground beef, but I didn't like them shrinking so much. I started using 91% lean about a decade ago. I don't notice the difference in taste...they still taste like beef for me. The salt/pepper or steak seasoning comes through more than the beef flavor. And if you don't kill them over high heat, they stay juicy too.

The world would be better if we all had a friend like Guga. Dude is an amazing human.

This is exactly the kind of thing that helps me eat easy and nutritious foods when I really don't have the energy to cook during chemo. Thank you.

I can't believe they cooked them all smooshed together on the grill. The A5 wagyu had so much fat it had to spill over into the other burgers making them taste better.

My preferred burger can either be med-rare lean 1" patty, or a well-done 2 x 1/2" patty with a lot fat. The 1" lets you crisp up the outside of a more lean patty without it over cooking. And somewhere in between (medium temp and medium fat content) makes for the best visually pleasing burger.

Wonderful young man and I hope there are more in his class so to speak that are like him. The future is bright if so.

The term "greenwashing" comes to mind with the Arby's burger and other grocery store wagyu. It's becoming more and more common in American advertising/packaging. Example: "Made with real strawberries grown in the USA" but only contains 5% USA grown strawberries and the other 95% are from various other countries.

Went to Japan in 1972 and Grandfather took us to his private club where he had Kobe beef brought in. We were unaware that it was $250/lb and ate a ton of it. It was the only beef we had while in Japan and it was excellent.

I subbed big fan of u and I love guga❤ been watching him for years

Of course, you provided much more detail than my own limited comparison of a year ago, which did not involve A5 Wagyu, and also, really good confirmation about the marketing scam that is American wagyu hamburger, ....that being that you loose a lot more of the product when cooking while the burger patty tends to want to fall-apart, and, that it does not provide any flavor improvement over typical 80/20 hamburger.

First of all, great video, educational content at its finest! Also here in Europe Wagyu has become a trend and the word Wagyu is indiscriminately used for European, Australian, American and Japanese Wagyu alike in grocery stores and restaurants alike. It is always important to make sure to confirm where the meat is from and in most cases, when the meat is from Japan, they should even be able to tell you the name of the brand or prefecture for example Kobe, Tajima, Kagoshima, Miyazaki etc.. If they just tell you "from Japan" it is most surely a scam since you usually take pride in this. As a professional who works with Wagyu almost on a daily basis on many levels such as import, cutting, wholesale and also catering, I would like to point out that is important to remember here that ribeye is used for the 100% Wagyu burger. This is definitely to make it comparable to the US beef as there is also ribeye used, but please keep in mind that these "steak parts" are usually almost exclusively used for steaks, as the name implies. Even among steaks there are more marbled steaks (ribeye, chuck roll) and leaner steaks (sirloin, rump), so of course to avoid it becoming "kudoi", which means overly rich in taste or fat in Japanese, leaner, cheaper and more firm meat is used for ground meat such as neck, shank or knuckle. Steaks can be sold at the highest margin and are easiest to use by the consumer, so naturally you want to cut as many parts of a whole set (Wagyu is mainly sold as a whole but separated cattle of about 350kg) as steaks. Tougher parts are not suitable for tender steaks, so slicing them in 1,4 mm slices for Sukiyaki hotpot is the way to go. Ground meat ranks lowest in price and preferability and I guess it is no secret that generally parts which cannot be sold otherwise are used for ground beef. Last but not least, please do not say the melted Wagyu fat goes down the drain! Fat holds the most flavor, so in Japan this excess fat is used for other dishes like fried rice and sauces. It is such a premium product that it is a waste to throw away and not use it otherwise. As other comments pointed out, the Wagyu fat may have altered the flavor of the US meat and that is what I want to show since you can use Wagyu fat instead of vegetable oil while preparing other dishes to enhance the flavor of Western food with Wagyu.

This reminds me when the whole "Angus beef" thing that happened roughly a decade or two ago. Everyone was having "angus" in and on everything.

Thanks!

I’d like to know what your favorite burger sauce was that you put on the final taste test?

What I love about Ethan's videos is that the conclusion is never "in my opinion, you should do this" but rather "this is my opinion, but you should figure out what you like." He clearly values cooking as an art form over anything else.

Ethan and Guga is a collab I had never considered and that's what makes it all the more special - two guys who are awesome at what they do, joining forces. I love this.

In Australia, a steak burger has an actual steak in it...

Great respect for measuring in grams!!! Thank you, dear man

I feel like a wagyu slider would be better than a burger. Wagyu is sooo rich if you had that whole burger you’d feel done with it halfway through. But a slider size would be more palletable

Great episode. There is a similar situation now with Iberico ham being referred to as the "wagyu of pork" on social media ads and sold as pork chops, etc

Really cool video Watching the wagyu burger evaporate was shocking.

How come you didn't do one with the packaged wagyu ground beef that you showed earlier? I would have loved to have heartd your thoughts on comparison.

Thank you Ethan. As someone who worked in a slaughterhouse for a year, i was lucky enough to try this experiment with several different animals/cuts. Like deer, elk, bear, ostrich, moose, raccoon, several other american mammals, and several different cattle. Like american bison, charolais, angus, hereford, longhorn, red angus, american waygu, new zealand waygu, a higland, and even a holsteen( i know sacrilege), but This was in Arkansas. We didnt have "Real" Japanese waygu. I have had a few real waygu steaks though. But we did all of these different burgers on a company picnic. Everything had been frozen b4, and we did have different cuts from different animals. We tried to do at least the same primal if we could. Its been 20 yrs but if i remember correctly we had 37 different animals. We did a blind taste test for everyone except for myself and the owner. Everything's had been hung for 2 weeks before freezing. For anything that didnt have a high enough fat content we added in enough lard or caul fat so that we had roughly a 70/30 blend. This was a fairly small company, we had about 60 employees. The overwelming majority of people preferred the elk, with a few preferring the bison or the ostrich. Until ya do testing like that you dont really know what you'll prefer. We had people rate their top 10. Few people actually had any cattle on their top 10 list. Alot of people were surprised how good the "cute" animals were, like raccoon, bear, opossum etc. Just goes to show you that we just dont know what we dont know. Factory farming has turned americans into beef chicken and pork only eaters, and theres so many other things that are absolutely amazing that we could be eating.

This is peak KZfaq content. I got so tired of the trend where every video was telling me I do everything in my life wrong. Thank You for actually recognizing all the nuance and informing us to make our own decisions.

thanks man i love yout videos, very high quality in every sense :)

I have grand mal seizures, had one earlier and woke up to find a HUGE hole in my bathroom wall that my head went through and my glasses broken, thankfully I have a backup just really loose frames sadly... anyway I'm slightly disoriented, possible mild concussion and going to the hospital here soon... but I just wanted to say as nauseous as I feel and nothing sounding appetizing this looks sooo freaking good!!!!!! actually helping my nausea thank you!!! lol

Nice one. Just a thought: in the first test they should have been fried separately as rendered fat from real wagyu could have "enhanced" taste of two other burgers.

Save the beef fat. I've used it to fry hash browns, potatoes, french fries, and perogies before and it's delicious. You can filter and reuse it pretty much indefinitely or until it's all gone. Just save an old coffee can and throw it in the fridge. I mix it with my saved bacon fat.

15:00 Where do you shop for $4.00 Prime grade 80%-20% ground beef. It is $7.00 a pound when on sale here in Las Vegas.

00:00 🥩 Wagyu's evolved meaning: Originally a high-grade, marbled beef from Japan, but now broadly used in food marketing for various products. 01:08 🇯🇵 Authentic Japanese Wagyu: Known for extremely high marbling (up to 56%) and unique flavors due to genetic origins, feeding strategies, and strict grading. 04:30 🍔 Wagyu ground beef experiment: A5 Wagyu beef melts fast due to its low melting point (59-77°F) compared to USDA Prime (104-122°F), affecting texture and taste. 08:39 🤑 True A5 Wagyu taste: A5 Wagyu burger is intensely beefy and delicious but expensive, losing much fat while cooking, making it costly and potentially wasteful. 10:18 🍔 Mixed Wagyu and USDA Prime taste: Mixed A5 Wagyu fat with USDA Prime creates a softer, texturally interesting burger with intensified flavors. 13:38 🥩 Wagyu's cost and consumption: A5 Wagyu burgers are amazing but not practical for regular consumption due to the high cost and fat wastage. 14:36 📜 Wagyu in the US: Limited purebred Wagyu in the US, with a mix of genetics, lacking regulated grading for consumer transparency. 15:18 🌐 Wagyu's US journey: Wagyu bulls were imported in '76, leading to crossbreeding; however, Japan imposed export bans, making true Wagyu rare outside Japan. 18:44 🛒 Wagyu labeling issues: Lack of regulated grading in the US leads to potential misleading use of "Wagyu" label on products, lacking transparency for consumers. 19:39 💰 Costly ground Wagyu: A5 Wagyu ground beef, despite its higher price, is made leaner than the A5 steak used in the experiment, raising overall costs. 21:02 🍔 Burger taste test: Testing four ground beef options, including American Wagyu, USDA Prime, and cheaper alternatives, to discern flavor differences in burgers with added toppings. 21:46 🍔 Blind taste testing ground beef from $4/lb to $35/lb reveals subtle differences. 22:15 🤔 Texture differences noticed more than distinct flavor variations during initial taste tests. 23:23 🍔 After multiple tastings, no significant flavor distinctions detected between the burgers. 24:29 🥩 Identified the ground beef types: Chuck, American Wagyu, A5 Wagyu, Prime. 25:22 🧐 Wagyu ground beef might not be worth the price if other factors like fat content and cooking method are similar. 26:04 🍔 Burger crafting involves multiple choices beyond ground meat, including bun, cheese, sauce, and toppings. 27:28 🤓 Suggests focusing on personal preferences in cooking and toppings before worrying about specific ground beef types. 27:41 🛒 Considers other factors like supporting local farmers or specific uses (e.g., tacos) when buying ground beef. 28:08 📚 Emphasizes using the video as an information resource for making informed purchasing decisions.

Love the Guga cameo. I have been lucky enough to have regularly eaten grass fed beef from my parents' lifestyle block. The difference between that and storebought beef (here in New Zealand) is pretty astonishing. Weirdly enough, the most significant differences in flavour and texture have been when making air dried jerky (Biltong). I made a batch last year that initially looked like it had something wrong with it, it was far too wet, like it hadn't driend enough at all. after a week of drying, I took some out to cut up and try, and was astounded to feel how fatty it was, it was actually difficult to cut, but the meat itself had dried and cured properly. It was the best preserved meat product I have ever had. Every bite had ribbons of fat streaming out of it and it was lovely. My parents have since sold the land where we grazed the cows, so I probably won't be lucky enough to have anything like that again (at least not cheaply). They took very good care of their cows and usually had Angus, Hereford or Friesian. When the butcher came by to slaughter and dress them, he would once slapped the meat to show how fatty it was and said that it was about as good as Wagyu. I'm not going to make that comparison since I have never had proper Japanese Wagyu, but it does indicate that the way you raise and feed the cows makes a huge difference in the finished product.

75/25 chuck is what we always use for burgers. My buddy started buying Wagu tallow, and we use like a tablespoon of that on the flat top and cook all the burgers in that grease. Makes em a little more 'beefy' without costing an arm and a leg. Bigass bucket of tallow was like $25 and will last several years worth of use.

I buy some of the hybrid stuff for ground beef, decent compromise and you get the best of both. The texture is very different

A local farm sells A4 and 5 Wagyu beef, processed. In addition to buying whatever cuts you want, you also can buy a quarter, half, or full cow. You get all the standard cuts, a few modern ones, and a fairly large amount of ground wagyu. The prices of course are not as high as imported Wagyu, but it's still the same blood lines, still the same care and consideration into raising it, and still the same level of marbling and fat content. The farmer will sometimes throw in less popular cuts with an order to avoid having a bunch of it just sitting.

I loved your research on the subject. Request you to make a video on Kosher and Halal, please.

worth noting that by cooking them so close to each other you got the Wagyu fat soaking into the other burgers. This would definately make them taste better too.

Awesome comparison and great informative video! Should be required viewing for all weekend grillers. Thank you!

I like these tests in these videos. We learn stuff, and he tries stuff so we don't have to. If someone wants to make a really flavorful burger that doesn't shrink so much, try ground round and also try grass-fed (especially when it is on sale at HEB or wherever). Ground chuck is a third choice, and they have some sales on that one, too. I like ground round in any loose-meat dishes I make since it has so much more flavor than regular ground beef without all the fat that must be poured off. Disclosure: Too much beef fat makes me feel a little yucky to my stomach after eating it, but stuff like 90% lean or ground sirloin lacks flavor and is harder to cook properly. Here lately, ground round seems like it has a higher fat content than usual, and I have thought about mixing it with maybe 1/4 to 1/2 ground sirloin, but have not done so. I should try it in a loose-meat dish --- since it has the ease of mixing it in the pan while cooking while the fat in the ground round will help in the cooking of the ground sirloin.

I have a question, I tend to only like lean cuts like filet mignon, since it has little to know fat, does getting the top rate Wagyu taste dramatically different/better for such cuts?

I've had soooo many people try to tell me that American "wagyu" is the same as genuine, high quality Japanese wagyu. I'm so glad I now have something to send them when they tell me that! 😋

There is one problem with the experiment - the burgers were fried side by side and very close one to another. The vast quantities of the Wagyu burger fat probably got into the other burgers and made them taste much better than they really are. Should have done the frying separately.

Excellent!

LOVE GUGA!!! & I just found Ethan... And OMG! I'll just use 1 word; "OBSESSED"!!! 😊 This guy is Absolutely Amazing! So thorough! So detailed! Yet in such a "matter of fact" kind of way! He's "My People"😊 I couldn't hit subscribe fast enough, Lol😁

Guga and Ethan? My fav two meat fellas meet 😻

By the way, you should have mentioned how those so-called "Wagyu" burgers at Arby's are cooked: they are frozen and deep-fried in the same oil that they cook chicken in. That probably has some effect on the flavor, although I didn't notice when I ate one. The first time I ate one, I had no clue how they were cooked and would have assumed that they were cooked like most fast food burgers on a flat top grill. Then, I got a job at Arby's and discovered that they don't even have a flat top grill and that their burgers were deep-fried. I was shocked!

you can use the left over liquid fat to make some great souce / Gravy or beef soup ...

we ate at a high end steakhouse here in austin and it came with A5 japanese waygu --Texas Waygu.?.....and another high end cut. the A5 CRUSHED IT hands DOWN. It def is amazing.

The Wagyu KZfaqrs should make a lobbying group to change legislation to accurately label Wagyu and Kobe beef

I always looked at "ground wagyu beef" at the grocery store and thought it was a waste. Glad to confirm my beliefs and now I don't need to worry about it.

@8:25 - Beef tallow is a wonderful by product. Fry your morning eggs in left over steak or hamburger grease.

Not sure why I watched this. I haven't been able to eat beef for the last 20 years or so and 99% of the time I don't mind but looking at those burgers makes me want to cry a little. My goodness they look wonderful. Thanks guys.

Love guga he gets so involved, not just there to listen but there to give his insight. Treats others fans as his own

I think it was about 10 years ago (when Wagyu really started to become popular in Europe) that I read an article about how much was imported into the US and how much was being sold as "genuine" at restaurants.....the numbers didn't really match. IIRC lots of A5s were being sold at US restaurants years before Japan even started exporting their beef crack.

I've been saying this since I first saw a commercial for a wagyu burger, "I don't believe that's actually wagyu, but even if it was, it would be a waste of wagyu."

It's honestly a lot like Chocolate imo. Tons of places claim "swiss chocolate" but most of it is garbage filled with wax. Tons of places claim Wagyu beef and it's either not the real stuff or it's been frozen/preserved so long it's gone down in quality.

Collabs like this are the best. Guga is certainly different in tone from Ethan, but I a way he’s always been just as methodical and curious as Ethan. 💛

What a great video! I work in the wagyū business and the whole experiment was really interesting to see. Thanks also to bring some awareness about the Wagyū nomenclature, meaning and real fullblood experience!

Great video! Whats the name of the burger sauce?.

I know that it is possible to acquire wagyu tallow online. It has a different flavor than standard beef tallow. Certain youtubers like to use the wagyu tallow on their brisket when they wrap it after the bark sets. This burger experiment makes me want to try wagyu tallow on my next smoked brisket. I have tried one "American Wagyu" brisket in the smoker, and it was quite good. The biggest difference I noticed was that the flat on the wagyu brisket had a consistency similar to the point on a USDA prime brisket. Flavor difference was slight. Best bang for the buck is still the USDA Prime brisket.

My two favorite meat cookers in a single video. Thanks for the collab and the info.

Ethan, I just wanted to say not only is your information amazing but just your attitude and presentation makes us viewers feel so included

might interest you to know, it actually bred in Australia, because of a plant that grows naturally here, full of salt, hence it being called saltbush, but it has a high nutrient content, all this, with the breed that has always been used, increases the marbling, fat content in general and flavour of the meat itself, not sure when it started, but I personally learned about it in the 90s, Kobe and Wagyu also promotes it's Australian bred it could be an interesting content for you to look into why and how, as well as how long they have been doing it, there's a strong droving history in Australia and story of how they noticed the plant improved all breeds, not just Wagyu/Kobi

What I do for "wagyu" is get a really cheap cut with lots of excess fat to really spike up the fat content in the ground beef to wagyu levels (i like 60/40 vs the standard 75/25) to help somewhat replicate that melty feel