Steak - Mark Schatzker [1]
The best steak my cousin Michel Gelobter ever ate was in the Sierra Nevada during the summer of 1980. He was working at a pack station high up in the mountains, living in a small shack with two other guides. Farther down the slopes, horses and cattle were grazing the summer pastures. He saw the cow alive before it became his meal. It was an unusually tall black-and-white castrated male—a steer—standing in a corral, where it was getting fat on hay, sweet sagebrush, and grass. A few weeks later, his boss delivered meat up to the cabin, and the men started with the tenderloin, which is known in fancy talk as the filet mignon. They put it in a pan with salt and pepper, then placed the pan inside a propane stove set to broil. Michel doesn’t remember cutting the steak or chewing it, but he does remember the flavor. “It tasted buttery,” he says. “It was just slightly tougher than pâté and unbelievably juicy.” The steak brought all three men to the same level of extreme astonishment. “I don’t think any of us had ever had anything like it,” Michel recalls. “It felt like a freak of nature. It was the best steak we’d ever had.” When the steak was finished, Michel went over to inspect the remaining raw beef. It was a dark brownish red, with lots of streaks of white in it. Since then, my cousin has been searching. He has eaten “a fair amount of steak,” some of it very good, but none of it equal to the Sierra Nevada steak of 1980.
The best steak I ever ate gave way between my teeth like wet tissue paper under a heavy knife. There was a pop of bloody, beefy steak juice and I had to close my lips to keep any of it from escaping. The problem is, this steak lives only in my imagination. I haven’t actually tasted it—not yet, anyway. It’s a false memory, of the culinary variety.
There have been, certainly, remarkable steaks in my past, most notably one at a Peruvian chain restaurant in a suburban mall in Santiago, Chile. It was served on its own plate, separate from the French fries, allowing the juice to pool in a manner that seemed premeditated. It was not the most tender steak I have ever eaten, but its deliciousness floored me. When I was done eating it, I raised the plate to my mouth, tipped it up, and gulped the juice in one long, excellent sip. I was ready to order another one, but I had a plane to catch.
Steak came to me the same way consciousness did. One day I woke up, and it was there. My father started grilling it when I was around nine, as I recall, which is to say that’s when he started sharing steak with his youngest son, because he had been buying it and cooking it regularly ever since the trip to MacDonald’s Restaurant. By the age of eleven, I knew the difference between a New York Strip and a T-bone (the bone). When my parents visited their three boys at summer camp, they would bring cold steak, black cherries, and icy cans of Coca-Cola.
My relationship with steak started getting, as they say, complicated in the early 1990s. My eldest brother, Erik, moved to South America and began sending regular dispatches on all the great steak he was eating. Every time I spoke to him on the phone, he evangelized about his latest filet or rib eye, and I would hang up jealous and hungry. One day he told me the secret to a great steak: season it only with salt and pepper. I went out and bought the most expensive steaks I could find and did as he said. The piece of meat on the end of my fork tasted like textured salt water.
I did not give up. Most of the steaks I cooked resulted in textured salt water, but occasionally there was a standout.