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Bwog’s food editor Jon Hill travels this week to Brooklyn to find a taste of Australia.
Almost everyone these days seems to have a beef with beef.
Cardiologists blame it for clogging arteries, animal rights advocates don’t like the way it’s processed, and environmentalists resent its carbon footprint. Beef has become a bad guy in the culinary world, a symbol of the excesses and failures of the modern diet.
Yet even with red meat getting such a bad rap, U.S. beef consumption has remained fairly steady. Poultry and pork have come on strong, but as far as substitutes go, we Americans have not found a good alternative to the T-bone steak.
Maybe it’s time to widen the search—to Australia.
The continent is home to a large land animal that is one of the planet’s most abundant (and most edible) mammals, the kangaroo. Nearly 30 million of them roam Australia, and they have been part of the traditional Australian diet for more than 400 centuries. Only recently, though, have agriculture experts zeroed in on the kangaroo’s potential to be the next major commodity in international trade.
If beef represents the culinary villain, kangaroo would be the hero. It’s lower in cholesterol, higher in protein, and rich in certain anti-cancer compounds. Kangaroos produce no greenhouse gases and they require no extra food or water from ranchers. Conservationists have even calculated that increased kangaroo consumption could save the world 15 megatons of greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.
But could kangaroo ever compare to USDA prime?
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Long Tan restaurant |
Considering Qantas ticket prices, I was lucky I only had to travel to Brooklyn to find out. Long Tan, a popular Thai restaurant in the Park Slope neighborhood, serves kangaroo grilled teriyaki-style over salad greens. Seeing this dish’s description excited me with its purist preparation—the kangaroo would be able to strut its stuff free of heavy sauces and aromatic spices that normally accompany Thai cuisine. What I would be tasting would be sure to be the real, unadulterated Australian meat.
When the kangaroo arrived fanned out in strips over my salad, I realized that beef and kangaroo are almost impossible to tell apart at the end of a fork. The meat’s pinkish, raw middle ringed with a darker, well-done caramel color was identical to steak, and its fragrant smell was a dead-ringer for grilled sirloin.
Kangaroo mimics beef’s taste superbly, too. I expected a certain level of gaminess in the meat—especially considering kangaroo is “harvested” from wild herds—but the only note I detected of my dinner’s Outback origin was a slightly more pronounced metallic flavor. The texture, meanwhile, was supple and juicy.
Such similarity works to kangaroo’s disadvantage, though, as I discovered that the meat never took on an identity of its own during the meal. No new or special flavor stood out to recommend itself again for future dinners. Instead, I was just reminded how delicious beef is. Kangaroo is the quintessential impressionist in this sense, always turning in a perfect imitation but never transcending the act.
For what started out to be an adventure in dining, this meal ended up feeling strangely familiar. Beef has strong competition in kangaroo, but only from the more intangible standpoints of ecology and nutrition—tastewise, they’re evenly matched.
And maybe that’s all kangaroo has to do if it hopes to dethrone beef. Diets will not shift rapidly or easily to a different-tasting, exotic meat, no matter how much better for people or the planet that meat may be. Beef’s replacement must be beefy to the utmost degree, and kangaroo fits that bill.
What becomes of the T-bone, we’ll have to see.
WHAT IT IS: Grilled kangaroo
WHERE IT IS: Long Tan, 196 Fifth Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn
HOW MUCH IT IS: $16.00, with Asian coleslaw
HOW TO GET THERE: Take the 1 train to Times Square and transfer to the R. Get off at Union Street Station, walking one block east on Union Street. The restaurant is at the north end of the block.
–JYH
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16 Comments
@Biologist the similarity in tastes leads us to conclude that interbreeding may be feasible. Ongoing studies are focused on the creation of hybrid species, i.e. cowgaroos. The introduction of augmented flatulence capability into the kangaroo architecture may produce an organism capable of rapid propulsion on account of these gaseous emissions.
@cheers As I’m studying abroad in Australia right now and have had kangaroo more than a few times, there are a couple of things about this post that seem a bit strange… First of all, a large part of the reason why kangaroo is considered so much more eco-friendly than beef is because it isn’t raised on farms, but rather hunted, so their feed isn’t paid for nor do they require huge tracts of land. It’s an extremely low cost meat right now because of this, but in order to replace even a part of the beef market, this would quickly change (similar to how natural fisheries are quickly being depleted). This in turn would probably result in kangaroos being farmed as cows are, which would probably negate most of the environmentalism argument.
Also, although kangaroo probably tastes more like steak than any other meat, I definitely would not describe it in the way that it is described here, nor would any Australian. It’s a very rich meat as steak is but it does have a distinct flavour– not a gamey one, as the author noted, but not quite like steak. Although I think that ultimately a really well-seasoned steak probably has a better taste, the great thing about kangaroo is that it requires very little seasoning or anything else to be absolutely delicious. Perhaps the restaurant simply did not prepare it well or did not serve kangaroo as fresh as those down here… Also, I just thought I’d note that kangaroo really isn’t all that common around here and restaurants that serve it usually cater more towards tourists.
@ttan YOU ATE $@*$#&*$* SKIPPY?!!?
@... the kangaroo is a socialist, it stomps in the face of joe the plumber.
@Delish Kangaroo is AMAZING. It has the consistency of steak and the taste of lamb. I LOVE it.
@Lexy If you want to try tasty game that is different from beef, alligator, venison and (if cooked well) bison will do the trick
@i love me some rocky mountain oysters
@yes Ground bison (I think the supermarkets call it buffalo, though) makes for a really tasty burger. The Heartland Brewery makes a pretty decent buffalo burger. Also, ostrich tastes a lot like steak, but it smells awful when you cook it.
@what do you call imitation beef?
Vegeta-bull!
@number 5 and furthermore, if kangaroo comsumption became mainstream, they would be factory-farmed just like every other agricultural animal, and that’s where the majority of the environmental issues stem from.
@yes, kangaroo imported from another hemisphere will certainly negate beef’s carbon footprint! good math!
@pssst kangaroos aren’t mammals, they’re marsupials.
@hmm never mind…according to wikipedia, marsupials are an infraclass of mammals.
@wait kangaroos don’t fart?
@hmmmm Isn’t it simply strange, in the first place, to be an environmentalist and to advocate the slaughter of kangaroos for human consumption?
@sev but doesn’t shipping it halfway around the world really negate the kangaroo’s lack of an impact on greenhouse gas emissions? Or is the Kangaroo served in park slope raised in Jersey?