Steak - Mark Schatzker [107]
The best steak I had eaten so far in the course of my search was grass fed. So was the worst. I bought it from a man I found on the Internet who raved at adjective-laden length about his pasture-raised Angus cattle. I dialed the phone number provided, and the woman on the other end assured me that the steak was indeed the finest she had ever tasted, no question about it, and that all their customers felt that way. Within seconds she had my Visa number, and two days later I possessed a piece of meat that was, technically, steak but looked, smelled, and tasted amazingly like liver—although describing it as such is unfair to liver, because there is such a thing as good liver, and this steak was not it. The flavor would convince anyone wearing a blindfold that he was eating organ—an old, atrophied, abscessed organ left in the trunk of a car sitting in a Miami parking lot for two weeks in July—not muscle. Tasting it made for an unexpected Proustian moment, as the memory of detesting liver as a little boy came flooding back. I was inclined to spit that grass-fed Angus steak into my fingers and surreptitiously toss it under the table and hope the dog found it before Mom did, which is how I dealt with liver back when I wanted to be a house builder. I had a sudden appreciation for the autonomy of adulthood. I was a big boy now. I stood up, dumped the steak in the garbage, and ordered pizza.
My brother bought steak from a Mennonite farmer selling pies by the side of the highway halfway between Toronto and Little Hawk Lake. The cow was grass fed, and seemed to have eaten its way through several acres of onion grass, judging by the taste. On the grill, the meat turned a whitish gray, and milky-colored gobs of fat dripped from it. At least it was cheap, unlike some grass-fed organic strip loins I purchased at a fancy butcher shop that were dry and tough and tasted like mold.
I visited a farmers’ market where men with scraggly beards and women not at all in thrall to the beauty myth were sitting in the grass playing bongos and folk guitar, and where if I had spontaneously burst into “Kumbaya” someone would have broken into harmony by the third syllable. The grass-fed steak I bought there tasted very much like rotten fish marinated in tepid dishwater. Later that fall, I found another farmer at a different market selling grass-fed shorthorn. I bought a pair of good rib eyes—not El Mirasol good, but good all the same. The following May the market reopened after a winter hiatus, and I got more steaks from the same farmer. This time they were tough and gamy, which is a polite way of saying they had the kind of flavor that made you wince.
What was going on? Some—possibly even all—of the following: The cows weren’t finished, which is to say they weren’t fat enough before being slaughtered; they weren’t grazing on the right kind of grass; the lean carcasses had been dry-aged too long, and mold had penetrated the meat and infected it with a bad flavor; the cattle had grazed on a type of grass called fescue that can be infected with a fungus that makes the meat taste off; the cattle grazed in spring on the wrong kind of grass, which, at that time of year, has too much protein in it and not enough carbohydrates, causing what meat scientists call an “off flavor” in the beef; the carcasses were too lean and became shocked by the abrupt cold of the meat cooler, which turned the meat hard; the beef came from “continental” cattle—Limousin, Charolais, and so forth—that don’t do well on grass; the cattle weren’t “on the gain” when they were slaughtered, which means they were getting skinnier, not fatter, a condition that makes them taste terrible.
How did I know all this? I had begun receiving a small but fascinating publication called the Stockman Grass Farmer. (Anibal Pordomingo is a regular contributor.) Part newspaper, part how-to manual, it’s written for and by folks who farm the old-fashioned