Steak - Mark Schatzker [125]
There are people who do. There are people out there crafting steak of great beauty. It was time to go and taste some.
It was time to pay another visit to Allen Williams.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A RETURN TO THE HEARTLAND
There is more than one way to tell how sweet a field of grass is. You can take a Brix reading, for example, which is what winemakers do when they want to tell if the juice inside their grapes is sweet enough. Grass doesn’t give its juice up as easily as a grape does, however, which means you have to squeeze it through a garlic press and aim the drops onto a device called a refractometer, which tells you the Brix levels. A good reading is around 12 or 15, although Allen Williams will settle for 10. He hopes for better, though. He has seen grass that scored in the upper 20s, at which point it’s as sweet as a ripe grape.
The meat scientist in Allen Williams loves the precision of a refractometer, which is why he was stooped over, tearing off clumps of Colorado grass destined for the garlic press while hot Colorado sun darkened his neck. The particular patch of Colorado grass in which Williams was standing is part of Maytag Mountain Ranch, which is situated in a stretch of naturally moist peat and glacial till sandwiched between the Wet Mountains to the east and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the west. The ranch’s owner, a friendly, large-framed man named Russ Maytag, prefers a more traditional device than the refractometer: a dairy cow. “Let her eat the grass,” he said, “milk her, and then drink the milk. If it tastes sweet, the grass does, too.”
There was no milking cow out in the fields today, but Maytag was not out of options. He suggested I assess the sweetness of the grass the simplest way of all: by tasting it. “I eat the grass all the time,” he said, and inserted two fresh blades in his mouth.
If the stuff growing at Maytag Mountain Ranch were in the produce aisle, it would be the heavyweight of the salad world. Arugula is iceberg lettuce, by comparison. I crunched a blade between two molars and a sweet, tealike liquid spread over my tongue. I tasted herbal, green, and peppery. The leaf itself was awful, as rough as a cat’s tongue, but the stuff inside I could have savored all day. I spat out a pulpy wad and reached for another juicy blade.
Williams was not eating grass. He was staring, in a state approaching rapture, at a clump of manure. “You know you have too much protein when the manure is runny,” he said. “But you know the mix is right when the turds are firm.” He mushed it with his foot. “That’s pretty good,” he said. Turd observation, it seems, is another way of determining if grass is sweet or not. Williams didn’t comment on the smell, but it was good, too: herbal, also floral. This cowpatty was another substance altogether from feedlot manure, so benign that you might well pass it off as cheap filler for potpourri.
Williams had not finished examining the manure. He drew my attention to its surface, which was strewn with little holes, as though someone had fired a shotgun at it. The holes were made by dung beetles, which lunch their way through a patty and drink down a liquid referred to, in some scientific circles, as “dung slurpie,” in doing so cycling nutrients from the grass back into the topsoil. Williams used the toe of his boot to lift off the sun-baked shell from the top of the patty, exposing the moist interior to bright sunlight and sending dung beetles scurrying into their little holes. Williams turned to me and asked, “Do you know how few pastures you see this in?”
He now turned his attention to a patch of red clover, which had little red blossoms shooting up. “I like to see a good mixture of legumes,” he said. All around the clover was grass, which looked to me like generic meadow. Williams urged me to take a closer look. The grass was, in truth, grasses. Some had thicker leaves,