Steak - Mark Schatzker [113]
As I waited for Fleurance to get fat, I kept my meat hunger at bay with more of that barley-fed 1960s-style steak. And I continued experimenting, not with the type of steak, but with cooking.
The world had proved to be deflatingly conventional when it came to preparing steak. Only Japan, with its kiln-powered rocks and blasting tableside grills, seemed interested in innovation. Everywhere else, it was either hot grill or hot pan, which seemed to fly directly in the face of all those high-tech steak cooking methods you see on TV and read about in magazines. Ruth’s Chris Steak House, for example, doesn’t so much cook steak as briefly incinerate it on a broiler that cranks up to 1,800°F (the melting point of silver). That, however, is laughably crude compared to how the British celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal treats a rib eye. He starts with a rib roast that he browns with a blowtorch and then places in a 122°F oven—so cool he could crawl in there with it if he wanted to—where the roast “cooks” for eighteen hours, minimum. After removing it, he lets the meat cool for four hours; he then cuts out the bone, trims bits of charred exterior, slices what’s left into two-inch steaks, flash-sears them in a hot pan, and lets them rest. A day after igniting the blowtorch—during which time he could fly to New York, eat a steak, then fly back to London—the steaks are served.
My brother found a similar but pared-down technique in a cooking magazine, one among a recent flurry of stories claiming that standard hot-grill or hot-pan cooking was all a centuries-long mistake that resulted in meat that was overcooked and gray near the exterior and raw in the middle. (This is one reason why people tell you to let a steak rest, so that the fridge-cold interior has a few minutes to catch up to the scorching exterior.) According to this article, it was better to cook steak in a low oven for a long time until the entire piece of meat has been gently coaxed to an even medium rare, at which point you remove it, brown each side in an extremely hot pan, and serve.
I attempted it. I cooked a rib eye in a 180°F oven for forty-five minutes. When I took the steak out it was pink and oozing juice—one big chunk of medium rare. It tasted like warm carpaccio: bloody, savory, and juicy. But there was something missing: it didn’t taste steaky. It was all yang and no yin. I flash-seared the steak as instructed and sampled it again. Now it tasted like steak. Now it had sweetness, roastiness, and nuttiness and that slight hint of bitterness I was expecting. The difference? Maillard reactions. The comparatively intense heat of the pan had caused a whole class of complex chemical reactions to occur. It was an object lesson in flavor chemistry.
I got to thinking about thickness. Thicker, everyone says, is better. A standard steak in Tuscany is thick, but a bistecca alla fiorentina is thicker still. No self-respecting Texas cowboy eats a steak thinner than his clenched fist. But are the Tuscans and cowboys right?
Every steak is a balancing act between the browned exterior and the bloody center. Up to a certain point, a thicker steak is not a better steak, it is, rather, a different steak. It is bloodier and meatier. But beyond a certain point—two inches, perhaps—a steak isn’t a steak anymore; it’s roast beef. The ratio of browned crust to bloody center is out of whack—there just isn’t enough Maillard in the mix. (That, incidentally, is why when a family sits down to roast beef, there is a fight over the fabulously browned end slices. What everyone really wants is steak.) And when a very thick steak is cooked on a very hot surface, you find yourself with meat that’s burned and raw at the same time. Burned is not the same as Maillard. Burned is mouth-puckering bitter.
The world can learn much from the Japanese about steak thickness. Their wafer-thin strips of beef cooked on extremely hot surfaces produce bite-sized bombs