Starting from 20 10, high-end hotpot restaurants such as Xixiyuan No.1, Caojingjing and Ding Yue Restaurant began to sell snowflake beef at various prices. In Ding Yue Restaurant, the price of snowflake beef in this restaurant ranges from 68 yuan to 688 yuan, and the most expensive one is "eye meat". According to chef Mei Xingkui, eye meat is a piece of meat on the back of a cow. The eye meat of each cow is only ten or twenty Jin, which tastes good, so it is also the most expensive.
Mei Xingkui's operation process: first put ice cubes on the plate, then slice the beef and gently put it in. Every piece of meat should be stretched to make it look more beautiful like snowflakes. "When this variety first came, we didn't know how to put it, because the thinner it is, the better, but if it is cut too thin, it will collapse and look bad." A plate of beef is fixed at ten pieces, weighing about four taels, and the price is 688 yuan (equivalent to about 1720 yuan per catty).
Caojingjing Hotpot Restaurant in Hankou, Snowflake Beef is also the main brand. In addition to being used to rinse hot pot, a piece of beef weighing about 70 taels and priced at 988 yuan in the store tastes similar to ice cream when eaten raw. Wang Xiaofeng, the general manager of the store, said that snowflake beef was actually named after its appearance. The so-called "snowflake" is the beef with obvious red and white, which looks like marble. Snowflake beef originated from Rihe Cattle, and a number of independent brands of "Snowflake Beef" have emerged in China, such as Longxue Black Cattle in Dalian, Bao Qin in Shaanxi, Penfu in Yanbian, Yuxiang Garden in Beijing, Yili Garden in Shandong, Hong 'an, Qin Hao and many other brands. In Jiangcheng market, black beef from Dalian is the main source. Black beef is cultivated by introducing Kobe beef from Japan, obtaining fertilized embryos from Limousin cattle, and then transplanting the embryos to Fuzhou cattle in Dalian, China. This breed of black cattle sleeps in a soft bed, listens to music, drinks beer and warm water, lives in a "five-star" fattening shed, enjoys all kinds of delicious feed and grows in a comfortable environment. The price of better black beef is two or three hundred yuan per catty, and a cow of more than one thousand catties can buy an ordinary BMW.