Steak - Mark Schatzker [131]
The first thing Williams looked for was marbling. The heifer scored 2.89 percent. USDA Choice is 4 percent or better, but it was, nevertheless, a good showing, because the heifer was being kept on dry and dusty rangeland, not lush, sweet grass like back at Maytag Mountain Ranch. If she could score almost 3 percent on marginal terrain, she’d do well on good grass.
Next, Williams examined the bundles of muscle fibers, which are surrounded by sheaths of chewy connective tissue. He examined the angle at which they ran through the steak—if connective tissue runs even somewhat across the grain of the muscle, it makes a steak hard to cut and chew. He looked for connective tissue that was too thick. He found neither. The heifer scored an impressive 2.3 on tenderness. “If you slaughtered her today, she’d be tender,” Williams said. “There’s no gristle.”
The heifer scored even better—1—on stress, an index that is Williams’s own invention. Animal scientists have long known that when a cow is stressed, marbling is the first fat to disappear. But Williams has personally noticed that marbling is burned up in a particular pattern. A cow pulls fat out from the top of the rib eye first and works its way down. By examining the way marbling is deposited—if any of it is missing on top, basically—Williams can infer whether or not the cow is stressed, which is to say sick, agitated, on poor feed, running around too much, and so forth. The heifer’s marbling appeared as a dusting of white, not unlike the appearance of the Milky Way on a clear night, and the muscle was as cloudy on top as on the bottom. “This girl is showing no stress,” he said.
Williams now snapped a cross section of the rib eye, cutting it right where a butcher would. Appearing on the screen was an image of a steak that, despite being rendered in gray scale, looked so real you almost expected to see a grayscale baked potato and vegetables sitting next to it. There was, all told, 7.6 square inches of rib eye area—decent. Back fat was good, too. So was shape. “She’s performing well,” Williams dryly announced.
The next heifer performed similarly, and the bull that followed did, too. His rib eye featured less marbling, and the marbling was notably absent near the top. He was showing signs of stress, in other words, but that was to be expected in a young bull who was, as Williams put it, “spending all his time chasing the ladies.” Williams examined two more bulls and three more heifers, and they all scored pretty much the same. They were “uniform.” That is linebreeding for you.
When the testing was done, Allen Williams and Janet Talbott stood outside the barn and chatted. “Are you pleased?” Talbott asked, sounding nervous.
“Yes,” Williams said. “Your cattle seem very consistent. That’s what we look for. They’re tender. They have excellent muscle shape.”
In front of us, the flatness of the Laramie Plains was interrupted in the far distance by Jelm Mountain, which is home to one of the world’s leading infrared telescopes. Above it, a blue sky was crisscrossed by white contrails of now-distant airliners. Over in the corral, Bob Gietz’s Herefords were mooing like it was 1925. Genetically speaking, Allen Williams hit the jackpot.
All those rib eyes on the screen of the Aloka SSD-500 V reawakened a steak craving that had gone unquenched ever since Maytag Mountain Ranch. Two more hours of driving took us south to Fort Collins, Colorado, where we came upon a steak house called the Charco Broiler in whose fridge, at that very moment, sat five Tallgrass rib eyes, shipped at the behest of Allen Williams.
We kept right on going. There was a woman in Fort Collins I needed to talk to first. I had a question that I still hadn’t quite answered, and she was the only person in the world who could help me. It was the question Bill O’Brien asked me at Texas Beef, when we pulled up to one of the pens in his feedlot: “Do these cattle look