Jarrod Walsh remembers when Amy and Justin Dickens delivered a Speckle Park beef “sample” to his fine diner Longshore last year.
“They came past the restaurant and literally dropped off two half cows,” he tells Broadsheet. “I thought – all right. We’ve got a few week’s worth of barbeques here.”
Walsh had worked mainly with legacy beef producers including Westholme Wagyu until that point. But he’d heard about the couple’s Jad Speckle Park stud through one of Longshore’s longtime suppliers, Margra Lamb. But Walsh admits he was skeptical at first. “The marbling was so miniscule. My first thought was – this isn’t going to be great.”
But Walsh backflipped faster than Trump on a tariff when he tried it. “It ate like Wagyu. It was quite fatty in the mouth, but with a really beefy, grass-fed flavour. It was right up my alley.”
Walsh is one of several top chefs who’ve tried Speckle Park beef – including Mark Best, Icebergs’ Alex Pritchard and Jake Furst of Cinder, who spoke about the restaurant potential of the breed in a recent episode of the ABC’s Landline.
Named for its pretty black and white hide, Speckle Park was originally developed in Canada in the 1950s from five other breeds (Teeswater Shorthorn, Aberdeen Angus, Jersey, Galloway and Highlander) and was officially recognised as distinct in 2006.
Now, it’s kicking up dust in Australia.
Jad Speckle Park is among a handful of producers championing the breed here. The Dickens purchased 140 Speckle Park embryos from Canada in 2016. Today, their Greenvale farm in Yeoval in New South Wales’s Central West is home to one of the largest Speckle Park studs in the world.
When the couple first “stumbled” upon the breed back in 2012, they were impressed by its hardiness and feed conversion rate (that’s feed intake to weight gained).
“We ended up in Canada where we spoke to the original breeders, who kept talking about the bone characteristics of the animal, which is quite unique,” Justin tells Broadsheet. “Their bones are flatter in shape than a lot of European breeds, and that influences tenderness.”
The couple also learned that Speckle Park had been winning eating quality competitions in Canada “quite regularly”. It didn’t take long to figure out why.
“I just knew there was something very different about this meat,” says Justin. “You can overcook it and it’s still succulent. It holds moisture differently. The fat behaves differently. That was the impetus for us to spend $40k of our own money in research. We wanted to know why.”
The couple engaged professor Aduli Eo Malau-Aduli from the University of Newcastle, who took 50 samples from their stud. His research found that the succulence of Speckle Park beef was driven by higher levels of omega-3 than other cattle breeds. Meanwhile, the benchmark for a succulent steak has long been associated with marbling – the white streaks of intramuscular fat for which Wagyu fetches a high price.
“I think that’s a real breakthrough for the industry, and it’s a real frustration of mine that governing bodies like MLA and CSIRO aren’t researching other influences of eating quality,” says Justin.
“Marbling is absolutely a contributor to the eating experience, but it’s not the sole contributor,” adds Amy. “We need to give respect to other factors and maybe take a look at the path [the industry] is on at the moment.”
The path the Australian beef industry is “hell bent” on chasing involves keeping Wagyu on feed for up to 400 days to maximise marbling. “We’re producing bigger and bigger cows that are becoming harder to maintain, on one of the driest continents on Earth. It seems off a cliff,” says Justin.
Thanks to their genetics, Speckle Park can be fed for a fraction of the time and still produce flavourful meat. “It’s a much better environmental story. We can put this meat on a menu at a very competitive price, and I’m sure that the palatability of it will be right up there with the very best alternatives to Wagyu.”
The couple says we can expect to see Speckle Park steak on menus “imminently” and plan to distribute the product slowly to high-end restaurants while herd numbers and the supply chain come online.
In the meantime, Mark Best says he’s looking forward to the commercial development of the brand. “Decent intramuscular marbling on grass and the short stature of the breed has positive implications for what you can put on a plate – thicker T-bones at the same weight,” he tells Broadsheet. “I think they may have a point of difference in the market.”
While it’s not on Longshore’s menu yet, Walsh says he was “super excited” to be among the first to receive the product before it goes mainstream.
“Everyone in Australia is all about Wagyu. They don’t necessarily know about these different breeds coming up,” says Walsh, who currently serves a grilled dry-aged S Kidman sirloin on the bone with smoked beef fat sauce at Longshore. “It’s great to have something like this that’s new, but also affordable for restaurants to put on the plate.
“I’m 100 per cent jumping on this.”
