Pushing 'The Other Red Meat'
MONTROSE, Colo. — At 54, rancher Bob Hasse has always been a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy. For the last few years, the meat has been yak.
Three or four times a week, Hasse and his family break bread over prime cuts from the Tibetan beast of burden. They eat it for lunch and dinner. They use it in spaghetti sauce. They grind it up and pop it on hamburger buns. Hasse loves to grill a good yak filet mignon, topping it with a dollop of bearnaise sauce or a light apricot glaze that enhances the meat's natural yakiness.
"Yak has a more delicate taste than beef," Hasse said as he tended a couple of yak steaks over his backyard barbecue. "It's sweeter. It's less greasy. I don't know if I could ever go back to beef."
Hasse, who left battery manufacturing to become a rancher, wants nothing more than for lots of other people to crave a nice piece of low-cholesterol, high-protein yak. As president of the International Yak Assn., he is one of a couple of dozen ranchers who dream of making yak "The Other Red Meat" -- a feat characterized as practically impossible by some marketing experts.
"I think it's hopeless," said David Pursglove, a Washington, D.C., consultant who analyzes food trends for major corporations. Buffalo and ostrich didn't fill the nation's plates as their promoters had hoped, he said, and neither will yak.
"People don't go to restaurants to experiment. They go to have a good time," said Pursglove, who predicts that white tea -- but not yak -- will be the hot new thing among trendsetters in the next three years.
But casting your lot with that of the yak takes a certain kind of optimism in the first place. Hasse points to yak popping up on menus in upscale restaurants scattered around the West. Last year, the Saddle Peak Lodge in Calabasas showcased yak on a $65 four-course "tasting menu."
"People loved it," said executive chef Warren Schwartz. "Yak is a wonderful meat. But you have to do a little playing around with the name; we called it 'Himalayan beef.' "
Jerry McRoberts is the nation's biggest yak breeder. With more than 1,000 of the animals, which resemble shaggy cows, roaming his pastures in the western Nebraska hills, he controls half the nation's yak reserves. He also breeds yak and cattle to create the "half-yak," which bulks up a lot quicker than pure yak. Distributors buy his meat in bulk, including items such as the astonishingly cross-cultural yak bratwurst.
