Steak - Mark Schatzker [13]
Marbling equals deliciousness. Every meat scientist I spoke to at Texas Tech sang the same refrain, and study after study has proven the point. Fat is flavor. Because it is softer than muscle, fat is also tenderness. Fat is juicy, a quality that has given rise to the “lubrication theory” of marbling. As the droplets of fat melt, the muscle fibers are lubricated, and so too are the teeth and tongue and the warm, wet cave that is the mouth, making for a moist and satisfying chew. Fat, furthermore, triggers salivation. A marbled steak goads the mouth into joining in the festival of juiciness.
Marbling is one of many topics that grip the imaginations of meat scientists. Here is a discipline that craves the certainty of physics and the penetrating insight of psychology. There are factors meat scientists can talk about at the level of micrograms: amino acids, moisture content, monounsaturated fats. They can measure tenderness to a minute degree using a Warner-Bratzler device, a contraption that adds weight to a cutting blade to determine the exact resistance of cooked steak. (The more weight required to cut the steak, the less tender it is.) But meat scientists also wrestle with the mysterious, intangible qualities bound up in meat—flavor, satisfaction, succulence—and attempt to render them into numbers, too.
A not unusual day at the lab will see a meat scientist slip into a white lab coat and eat steak. These sessions, which can occur five times in the course of a single day at Texas Tech, are known as Beef Sensory Evaluations. They take place in a long, narrow, dimly lit space called the Sensory Evaluation Room. On the left wall is a row of seven booths separated by dividers so that a person sitting at one cubicle has no idea what the persons on either side of him think of the meat they’re eating. Red lights cast a trance-inducing glow that cancels out any potential cues of visual appeal. The ugly steak, after all, may be more delicious than all the others.
Evaluators face a blank wall. On the other side of the wall is another room where someone takes cooked steak—prepared on an industrial belt grill in a nearby kitchen, unseasoned—and slices it into morsels, then passes them through a series of hatches to evaluators in the Sensory Evaluation Room. Each evaluator puts the steak into his mouth, chews it, and records his sensory impressions on a score sheet. He may spit out the beef into an expectorant cup, as is common at wine tastings, but most of the steak is swallowed. After each sample, an evaluator takes a sip of apple juice to clear the steak residue from his palate, and then he clears the apple juice with a sip of water. He is now ready to evaluate again.
Using the senses of taste, smell, and feel, evaluators break each steak down into attributes, each of which gets a number. Juiciness ranges from extremely dry (1) to extremely juicy (8), and it comes in two forms: “initial juiciness” and “sustained juiciness.” The same is true of tenderness—initial and sustained, which likewise ranges from extremely tough (1) to extremely tender (8). There is also cohesiveness; springiness; beef flavor; flavor intensity (extremely bland to extremely intense); overall beef mouthfeel (extremely non-beeflike mouthfeel to extremely beeflike mouthfeel). “Off flavor” goes from 1 to 3 (none to strong off flavor). The most interesting category is “characterization”—1 is sweet; 2 is acid; 3 is sour; 4 is rancid; 5 is warmed over.
Sensory evaluations have proven the supremacy of marbling time and again. American meat scientists believe in marbling the way American physicists believe in atoms and American biologists believe in cells. It’s at the leading edge of research where things get more interesting, where beneath the refreshingly hard-and-fast truths like marbling awaits a world of intrigue and complexity. Take this “in-home beef study,” sponsored by Texas A&M University, which, incidentally, also fields a meat-judging team. It compared the preference for clod steaks—known to some as shoulder steaks—among residents