Steak - Mark Schatzker [124]
Fleurance proved to be quite the head-scratcher, fatty-acid-wise. Bazinet looked at her results and said, “Your cow is just really polyunsaturated. It’s weird.” Like the beefalo, Fleurance had a spike in ALA. But like the feedlot sample, she had spikes in linoleic acid and another unsaturated omega-6 called arachidonic acid, bringing her omega ratio in at a still respectable 3.1 to 1. This may have been due to all the nuts she had consumed, but it likely had to do with the fact that the farmer from whom I had bought Fleurance had fed her some corn. Strangest of all, however, was Fleurance’s sky-high level of the unsaturated oleic acid, which, along with the ALA and arachidonic acid, made her fat so absurdly soft.
Was it the nuts? Maybe. There’s lots of oleic acid in hazelnuts, walnuts, peanuts, and acorns, but Fleurance hadn’t eaten that many—usually just a few pounds a day, tops, and only for a few weeks. Bazinet wondered if there was a delta-9-desaturase situation going on. Did Fleurance, like the black Wagyu, produce enzymes that converted her stearic acid to oleic acid? It’s possible. But Fleurance actually had more oleic acid than a black Wagyu. (So maybe it was the nuts. . . .)
How did I know this? For weeks I had been hoarding a sample of pure black Wagyu beef and gave it to Bazinet with instructions that it was not to be grilled. I did not part with it easily, as it was the rarest kind of beef there is: grass-fed black Wagyu. It wasn’t Japanese. It came from Washington State. This particular type of Wagyu, which isn’t even available in Japan, had an insane omega-6 to omega-3 ratio of 1.3 to 1, and its fat was the least saturated fat of all the samples.
Grass-fed black Wagyu was something I’d been searching for ever since the trip to Matsusaka. All I found were rumors, the foodie equivalent of urban legend, always starting with, “A guy I know in Colorado knows someone who . . .” No one had seen actual grass-fed black Wagyu grazing in person. No one had tasted their meat. I was beginning to doubt they even existed, and then one day Sweet Grass Farm popped up on a Google search. It was located on Lopez Island, a San Juan Island bathing in cold Pacific water just off the coast near Seattle. The farmer was a former custom toolmaker named Scott Meyers, who sent me a rib steak by overnight courier.
Anyone who says cattle can’t marble on grass should have seen that rib steak, which scored better than USDA Prime. Meyers told me his steak tasted like “beef times a hundred,” which, if anything, is a tad conservative. The steak was so rich and flavorful I had to eat it slowly. It was so juicy and the taste so intense that I was reminded of extremely ripe fruit. It was to steak what espresso is to coffee. I couldn’t even cut through it at normal speed. I found myself watching the slow and delicate action of my knife as it sawed across the fine-grained flesh and released juice. It was like steak with headphones on.
The next day, I phoned Scott Meyers to ask, Why is your steak so good? He started talking about forage growth curves. He said something about carbon levels in the soil and carbonic acid-releasing minerals. He told me about how he had developed an apparently ingenious technique to prolong the seasonality of a forage called Reed canary grass, which gets as sweet as grass can but is usually long past its prime by the time cows get onto it.
His husbandry techniques had placed my experiment with Fleurance in a whole different light. I was, I realized, a hack. I couldn’t talk soil type or growth curves. I didn’t know ryegrass