Steak - Mark Schatzker [127]
(Note to self: Perhaps Fleurance should have been moved.)
The present pace was, if anything, a little tardy. The cattle were taking two or three bites off each grass plant, which didn’t leave enough green photosynthesizing leaf matter left on the plant for the grass to recover quickly. Maytag was therefore not achieving “optimal solar panel effect,” and he plans on installing more lines of fencing so the cattle can be moved to a new patch of grass every day.
The goal is to get his cows to take one bite per plant. At that clip, they will gain as much as three pounds per day, which approaches the level of gain a cow achieves on steamed, flaked, liver-destroying corn. Every day, Maytag’s cows will find themselves standing in a fresh field of sweet and tender grass. It is the cow equivalent of eating steak all the time.
Grass quality is Allen Williams’s number two problem in life. He is the chief operating officer at Tallgrass Beef, a company that produces about 5,500 steaks a week, every one of them from cattle that have not eaten a single kernel of grain in their entire lives. Put up against one of the big packing companies, Tallgrass’s output is minuscule, not so much a drop in the bucket as a drop in a lake. But in the young and vigorous world of American grass-fed beef, Tallgrass is a heavy hitter. It sells what’s known in the industry as boxed beef. Tallgrass supplies restaurants and supermarkets. People visit the Tallgrass Web site and enter a credit card number and days later a FedEx truck delivers a package of vacuum-sealed rib eyes, strips, burgers, short ribs, and hanger steaks to their front doors. Almost every Tallgrass skirt steak is claimed by the celebrity chef Rick Bayless, who serves them at his Chicago restaurants. To produce that many skirt steaks, you need a lot of cows and serious acreage of grass. Tallgrass works with two hundred ranchers in five states. Russ Maytag was one of them, until the local meatpacker wasn’t able to cut steaks to Tallgrass’s standards. But Williams hopes he will be again, and it’s not hard to see why, considering what the refractometer thinks of Maytag’s grass.
Bad grass equals bad steaks. And grass, as I’d learned, can be bad so many different ways. Soil, too, is crucial. It can be too dry or too wet. It can lack minerals, such as calcium and phosphorus, and the grass won’t be able to synthesize sugars, a problem that will show up in the flavor of the meat. Williams puts roughly a hundred thousand miles on his truck every year, a good deal of them spent taking him to Tallgrass finishing fields, so he can monitor soil quality, keep an eye out for onion grass and bitterweed, monitor Brix levels, and, of course, look at flanks, briskets, and buttons.
And yet grass is still only Williams’s number two problem. His biggest problem makes the task of growing good grass seem like a mere inconvenience. It not only keeps him up at night and infects his dreams, it sends him monthly back and forth across the country in search of a solution. As often as not, he comes home empty-handed.
Allen Williams’s number one problem is finding good cattle. America’s beef herd currently stands at roughly ninety million, but Williams estimates fewer than 10 percent of those cattle would taste good after four months on good grass. They are too tall, for one thing. They grow too fast and are bad at converting grass to meat and fat. Some of them don’t even know how to graze anymore. They just stand there in a field and bellow for the feed bucket.
Allen Williams has himself to blame.
“You go off to college and think you’re so smart,” Williams told me as we pulled out of Maytag Mountain Ranch and headed north in the hopes of locating a few first-rate cattle. “I was learning all this stuff from my college professors, and I’d go back home to the farm and tell my dad and uncles how to do things: