Steak - Mark Schatzker [121]
The night before, I’d had a dream that Fleurance graded Prime. Now I watched as Scotty laid the side on his band saw and cut through it, revealing the virgin rib eye. We scanned the red surface for flecks of white. There were a few, but not many. USDA Select. Fleurance was in great company, eatingwise, but I was disappointed.
A few hours later in Stadtländer’s kitchen, my mood spiraled again. I was making hay sauce, preparing a jus from Fleurance’s rump, as Christophe Raoux had instructed months earlier in Paris. But when I immersed the hay, which had been cut in August, into the jus, Stadtländer’s kitchen did not smell like a German hazelnut cake factory. The aroma was sweet, yes, but less so by orders of magnitude. Sugar levels! I thought, nearing panic. Carla’s hay was not sugary enough. The forage did not contain enough energy. No wonder the rib eye wasn’t marbled. Fleurance, it seemed certain to me now, was going to taste like swampwater. Or liver. Or perhaps an old shoe.
It was dark outside. The summer forage was a memory, covered by a blanket of downy snow. Flakes were falling from the sky, and the night itself looked marbled. Out on the highway, a wind was blowing the fresh snow into powdery little dunes. My brother and his wife arrived a little after 8:00 p.m., brandishing several bottles of red wine. Fleurance’s tongue was chilling in a snowbank, because it’s much easier to slice thin when it’s half frozen. Stadtländer brought it in, laid it on a cutting board, and used a high-carbon Japanese blade to peel the skin off and cut the muscle into wafer-thin slices. His wife, Nobuyo, has infected her husband with the Japanese love of fine knives and marbled tongue.
Unlike the rib eye, the tongue was something to behold—by Japanese standards easily A3. It was the most marbled tongue Stadtländer had ever seen in North America. “It’s beautiful,” he said, arranging the slices on a platter that he brought to the dining room, which was lit only by candles flickering on the tables and licks of flame in the fireplace. It was the kind of fireplace an Argentine could love, because straddling a six-inch layer of glowing logs was a freestanding grill—height adjustable—that Stadtländer designed himself and had custom made.
Slices of tongue were laid across the grill, and fat dripped down, sending up flares. Only seconds passed when Stadtländer flipped them, and seconds after that he removed them to a plate where they swam in a puddle of melted fat and pink juice. He salted them and tasted the first piece. In flowery menu-speak, he was eating grass-, fruit-, and nut-fed Canadienne beef tongue, dry-aged and sliced Japanese style, grilled over hardwood embers in a hand-laid century granite hearth. But who needed words? Stadtländer nodded his head, muttering, “Mmm.” He nodded his head again. “Mmm.”
My brother reached for a piece. “That’s good,” he said. “Really good.”
Stadtländer eventually found a vocabulary. “It’s very nutty. And I like the way the fat comes out. I don’t know where the fat is coming from, because if you look at the meat, it’s lean. But the tongue is totally speckled.”
My brother said, “I could eat this all day.”
I placed a round of Fleurance’s tongue on my tongue. The burst of fatty, mouth-filling juice was up there with the best stuff coming out of Matsusaka. The flavor was just as Stadtländer had described it: sweet and nutty. But also beefy. Hugely beefy.
Tongue, I decided right there, is a regal cut, the equal of rib eye. Why is it so underrated? Only Asians seem to revel in the joys of grilled tongue. Argentines boil theirs, and North Americans won’t touch the stuff.
The rib steaks hit the grill next. A rib steak is a rib eye with the bone attached. (Some people call it a “bone-in rib eye,” which is silly because the word eye denotes bonelessness, so they are effectively calling it a