Steak - Mark Schatzker [114]
As for the slow-heat method of cooking, I have doubts. My slow-cooked, flash-seared steak was good. But after finishing it, I took another raw steak and threw it on a standard hot grill. It was just as good, and it was ready in ten minutes.
The secret to great steak isn’t the thickness, or ultra-low heat or ultrahigh heat. It isn’t dry aging, either, which is commendable but overrated—any rib eye that needs to be aged for sixty days isn’t a good rib eye to begin with. The secret to great steak isn’t salting the day before, marinating in olive oil, or any other lost technique from the old country. The secret to great steak is great steak. Start with good meat, and it will be good even if you boil it. That 1960s-style barley-fed Angus steak tasted good because it was good beef. Period.
But it was not great beef. Its flavor did not match the fullness of fine grass-fed steak. I never found myself in a state of euphoria and incredulity over how mind-bogglingly excellent it was, which is the effect good food—a great steak, a stellar peach, a superb cake—can have. My wife put it this way: “That steak was like a mediocre play or movie. Your mind starts to wander halfway through.” But we ate and enjoyed those steaks, somehow forgetting about the greater beauty our mouths were being denied.
And then one day some rib eyes arrived from Washington State. They came from a creature called a beefalo, a cattle-bison cross that has slightly more cattle than bison in it, genetically speaking. The man who produced it, Mark Merrill, runs an outfit called Beefalo Meats. Merrill began raising beefalo so that people whose doctors had told them to stop eating red meat could still eat steak, because tests have found beefalo to have even less cholesterol and fat than roast chicken. But old-timers kept telling him, “Your beef tastes like what beef used to taste like.” Merrill feeds his beefalo hay and alfalfa and, when he can get it, apple pomace, which is what’s left over after you turn apples into apple juice. He sent me a box of rib eyes that had the kind of flavor we don’t have the words for yet, flavor you can shut your eyes and think about, like you’re listening to a story.
Grain-fed steak—even excellent grain-fed steak—is bland by comparison, and the reason is grain, which has a dulling effect on flavor. Used judiciously—as it is, for example, on the better farms in Scotland—grain can make steak raised on poor-quality grass palatable rather than disgusting. An oak barrel has a similar effect on wine. If you take a sour, mouth-puckering red wine and let it sit in an oak barrel for months, you will be amazed at how much easier it is to drink. The effect is similar to how a music producer with an arsenal of studio effects can put a tone-deaf yet sexy pop star in tune. But a young cow gorged too fast on too much grain is like an overoaked wine or an overproduced pop star: devoid of character. Ever since the 1950s, when we started feeding cattle corn by the truckload and killing them younger and younger, steak has been losing character.
Back in the days when steak had character, people didn’t put much on it. At the most famous steak restaurant in American history, Delmonico’s—which opened in New York in 1827, lasted just short of a hundred years, and was so revered for the deliciousness of its steak that it ultimately lent its name to a particular cut—a basic steak was seasoned with salt on both sides, basted with oil or melted butter, cooked over a “moderate fire,” then set on a hot plate with a little maître d’hÔtel butter (fresh butter mixed with chopped parsley, salt, pepper, and lemon juice) or clear gravy (a liquid similar to Christophe Raoux’s beef jus). If desired, a fancy French