Steak - Mark Schatzker [11]
Gawky and acne-challenged, they were gathered in a refrigerated room, dressed in long white lab coats and hard hats and staring intently at six sides of beef. The deliciousness of each side was determined in silence because talking is forbidden. Each competitor noted his or her findings on a clipboard, and after ten minutes a whistle blew and a woman yelled, “Rotate!” The group moved into another cold room where more meat of indeterminate quality was waiting. When it was over, they handed in their score sheets for evaluation. The winner was a young man named Markus Miller, who scored 713—28 more than the boy in second and 37 more than the top-ranked girl. Coming in last, with 149 points, was a boy from Hereford, Texas—a town named after a breed of cattle.
The Texas Tech Invitational Meat Evaluation Contest is one in an entire season of high school meat-judging events. Texas Tech itself is a university, with NCAA football, baseball, and basketball teams, all of which are known as the Red Raiders. It also fields a meat-judging team, and its contingent of Red Raiders is one of the best. The university hands out more than $50,000 every year in meat-judging scholarships. The team practices Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays for two hours, starting at 6:00 a.m. On Fridays, they get together after lunch and go to a nearby meatpacking plant to practice on fresh carcasses. Saturdays are called Super Saturdays. The team meets in the meat science lab at four in the morning, where coaches set up carcasses and cuts of meat to simulate the conditions of an actual competitive event. At noon, eight hours after arriving, they leave the meat lab. In a normal season, each member of the team will appraise thousands of pieces of meat.
The Invitational gives high school meat judgers a glimpse of a big-league venue. But do not make the mistake, as I did, of assuming the high school squads are manned exclusively by novices. Competitive meat judging can start as early as seventh grade, and in a group of fourteen-year-old judgers, veterans may be found. A Red Raider named Matthew Morales—a junior when I met him—was twelve when he judged meat for the first time. He was competing against high school students that were older than he was, and he had to squeeze in front of bigger kids just to see the carcasses. When he found himself face-to-face with the raw meat, he got butterflies. “I was looking at four big old pieces of meat,” he remembers. “I didn’t know what to do. The coach told us to relax, to turn around and not look at the meat, then look at the meat again and focus. And it worked. I came fourteenth out of sixty or so kids.” By his twenty-first birthday, Morales estimates, he had judged carcasses numbering in the hundreds of thousands.
Just as a varsity football, baseball, or basketball player who turns enough heads in college can turn pro, so can a meat judger. The U.S. Department of Agriculture employs 200 meat graders, 140 of whom specialize in beef. In a single day, a USDA grader can judge as many as 1,200 beef carcasses, each carcass requiring no more than six to eight seconds of the grader’s time. Like high school and college meat judgers— and just like the twelve-year-old Matthew Morales—the USDA grader is looking mainly for one thing: marbling.
Marbling consists of the grains, spots, and streaks of fat within a steak. The rim of fat around a steak is not marbling. The nub of fat in a rib eye is not marbling. But the small white dots and curls of fat spread throughout a steak’s red flesh are marbling. To a USDA grader, there is no greater quality that a piece of beef can possess. Steak with the highest amount of marbling is the best steak, period. It is called Prime. Next down in ranking is Choice, followed by Select, followed by Standard, which is “practically devoid” of marbling. A Standard steak is red through and through, with its only fat on the edges. It sells for a fraction