Steak - Mark Schatzker [105]
Yanqui Mike wrote about the experience on his blog, and since then he has been chronicling the alarming flavor implications of feedlots popping up all over the pampas. When he arrived in Argentina, every steak was great. Now, the duration between outstanding steaks is getting longer and longer. Great Argentine steak, he says, is disappearing.
He is as familiar with the reasons as anyone. Not long ago, a multinational company approached Yanqui Mike’s family and offered cash in advance—U.S. dollars—to plant grain. “It was a no-brainer,” he says. “We could not resist.” Company men showed up at the farm, took soil samples, analyzed drainage, and eventually settled on his best cow-grazing pasture as the place to plant grain. “This was pasture that had never before been planted,” he says. “Chemicals were sprayed. Fertilizer was laid down. They killed the grass, fumigated the insects, then planted. I couldn’t be there when they broke soil. It broke my heart.”
Yanqui Mike also enjoys a good testicle, and considered the ones at El Mirasol to be “scrumptious.” The testicles were from a lamb, not a cow, and ended a parade of stomach, intestines, and sweetbreads that made up the first course, all accompanied by glasses of crisp champagne.
The first cut of steak we ate was entraña, which Americans call a skirt steak and an anatomist calls the diaphragm. Yanqui Mike chewed, swallowed, and pronounced: “This flavor punch is what you try to communicate to people. You go through long stretches now where you can’t find it. Then boom—you’re back!” There was no flavor fade-out on the entraña at El Mirasol. It had the power of a trumpet blast, and it kept building. You could sit there with your eyes closed and meditate on the deliciousness raging inside your mouth. The flavor was big, bloody, salty, and just barely sweet.
The entraña was followed by vacio (flank steak), which had a prodigious flow of juice. Next came the tira de asado, the tenderest I had encountered so far, hugely juicy, and with a blow-your-hair-back flavor. I picked up each individual piece of rib bone and nibbled off every possible scrap of beef. I considered lifting the plate to my mouth and drinking the juice, but El Mirasol is a fancy sort of restaurant. Sitting near us were an elegantly dressed woman wearing an outfit heavy on the jewelry and a powerful-looking man in a suit, and I didn’t want to cause a scene, but hindsight tells me that a scene—a full-blown shouting match with plates hurled across the room—would have been worth it to imbibe that amazing liquid.
I walked away from El Mirasol feeling as if I’d just eaten some precious endangered creature. The fact—the sad, unfair, and hard-to-believe fact—was that Argentina’s great grass-fed steak is going extinct. My meal that afternoon would be a story to tell my children, a feature of the world consigned to history, something they could imagine but would never be able to taste. Oddly, I found myself smiling. The high would not wear off for several hours.
That night, I ate dinner—another asado—in the backyard of the house belonging to Vicky’s brother Peter, my other fifth cousin in Argentina. Peter has one of the more unusual jobs you’re likely to come across: he inspects oil tankers. We ate yet more steak and discussed the possibility of fitting big Saudi tankers with machine guns so that they could defend themselves against pirates off the coast of Somalia. (Which is to say, I suggested the machine guns, while Peter, who is exponentially more knowledgeable in such matters, gently dismissed the proposal.)
As wineglasses were drained, my thoughts turned to Mordecai Sternbach. Would he be happy to know that his great-great-great-great-greatgrandchildren had reunited over steak on the other side of the world? I think he would. But as far as my preference for grass-fed steak goes, old Mordecai would have shaken his head in disappointment. Mordecai Sternbach,