Eating meat was officially prohibited in the Edo period. The Hikone domain had beef anyway, because it was producing cowhide for armor and horse tack, and the animal does not stop at the skin.

In 1687 a man named Hanaki Denemon, working from the Chinese pharmacopoeia Bencao Gangmu, devised a miso pickle of beef. He called it hompongan and sold it as a restorative medicine, which is how it circulated legally. Records show it was made during the coldest month, from early January to Setsubun.

By 1781 the domain was presenting this miso-cured beef to the shogun Ienari, and in 1788 it added a dried beef of its own devising to what it sent.

Then the railway arrived. From 1888, cattle were shipped from Hachiman station. Until that point the animals had gone out through the port of Kobe, and everything that left that way was sold as Kobe beef regardless of where it had been raised. Once the trains carried them overland directly, the name Omi beef came into use, from around 1890. The definition of what may be called Omi beef was unified in 1991, and a certification scheme followed in 2007. A meat that survived under the name of a medicine finally got its own name from a railway timetable.