Steak - Mark Schatzker [129]
It had nothing to do with flavor. Williams’s mission was to improve the lives of cattle and the farmers who raised them. He saw grazing as a means of reducing the crippling expense of vaccinations, growth hormones, antibiotics, grain, protein supplements, vet bills, and dead cattle.
That changed in 2001. Williams was now working for a livestock cooperative in New England that had asked him to develop something that was extreme even by Williams’s standards: a “grass-only” method of raising beef. He helped them find good cattle, plant the right grasses, finish the animals adequately, and so forth. Eventually, it came time for Williams to put his steak where his mouth was. The hope was that the newfangled grass-fed beef would merely be competitive with feedlot beef. The plan was to win the hearts and dollars of consumers with the environmental, health, and animal welfare benefits of grass-fed beef. The taste only needed to be “acceptable.” Would it be? Williams didn’t know, as he had never eaten a “grass-only” steak before. The meat certainly looked good—marbled, decent fat cover, nice-sized rib eye.
Williams and some farmers gathered in a kitchen in Maine one evening and cooked a rib eye, a strip loin, a tenderloin, and a sirloin. Williams sliced into a steak, put the morsel in his mouth, and after a few chews, began silently revising the business plan. It was no longer about being competitive with grain-fed steak; it was about being better than grain-fed steak. Suddenly, it was about flavor.
In 2004, the television news personality Bill Kurtis—host of American Justice—asked Williams to become a partner in his new company, Tallgrass Beef, whose mission was to raise cattle on grass and create, as Kurtis put it, “the best beef out there.” Williams knew their single biggest problem would be finding good cattle. The only way they could consistently produce delicious beef on grass was to find old herds of British breeds that had somehow remained free of the taint of commercial breeding. He began a series of journeys into the heartland, chartering planes and logging hundreds of thousands of highway miles, traveling as far north as Canada and as far south as Mexico in the hopes of turning up pockets of old-time genetics.
Williams found some very good cattle on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains in Montana. They were black Angus with short legs, barrel-shaped midsections, and flesh that ran deep and thick. On his way to a farm in Kentucky one morning, he looked at the fields alongside the highway and saw more superb Angus cows grazing. He tracked down the farmer and bought some. He found outstanding Herefords in Kansas and an excellent herd of British White cattle—a rare breed—in Minnesota. Some of the best cattle he has ever come across was a herd of outstandingly retro Herefords in the remotest Sierra Madre in Mexico.
Those were the good cows, and they are all too few. Eight times out of ten, Williams will show up at a ranch and find feedlot cattle that are too big, tall, or “hard fleshing,” which means they won’t get fat on grass. The vast majority of them wouldn’t taste good even on the best grass.
As we covered mile after mile of highway, we passed cattle grazing on fields next to the highway. Williams would look over and say, “Angus. But you can tell there’s some Charolais in there.” He spotted fields that were overgrazed and others that were deficient in minerals. Most of the rangeland, however, looked just superb. We would cross over a rise, and the land before us would be a ruffled carpet of green all the way to the horizon. “This is excellent pastureland,” he would say, “just excellent.” Near Denver, the sprawl of malls and track homes poured into the rangeland like fungus. Williams looked at the big-box stores and the generic houses that are the same in Colorado as they are in Mississippi, Maryland, California, and New York. “This could be Anywhere, USA,” he said.
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