Steak - Mark Schatzker [136]
Fat cows taste better, period. It isn’t the fat that’s yummy; rather, there seems to be something in the process of growing fat that makes a cow taste good. Williams stressed repeatedly the importance of cattle being “on the gain” when they’re slaughtered, warning that the palatability of a cow—even an exceedingly fat cow—will suffer if the cow has been losing weight. The prestige that marbling commands to this day in North America and Japan, where governments award it their most laudatory grades, is a testament to our love of plump animals.
But marbling is not where flavor resides.
An interesting thing happened while Richard Bazinet, the nutritionist who studies brain fatty acids, ran the fatty acid profiles of the steak I gave him. In all four samples he tested—feedlot beef, grass-fed black Wagyu, the hay-finished beefalo, and Fleurance—the visible fat didn’t look all that different. The trim and marbling on the feedlot piece was white, whereas it was slightly off-white on the other three.
To run the fatty acids in his chromatography machine, however, Bazinet had to extract the fat from the meat and store it in test tubes. And when he did that, something unexpected caught his eye. The feedlot-beef fat looked like it did in the steak—white. But the other three samples were now considerably darker: the black Wagyu fat was the color of apple juice, the beefalo fat was just north of a dark broth, and Fleurance’s fat looked like tea. The color, it seemed to me, actually matched the flavor to some degree. The beefalo, which tasted deep and brooding, had the deepest, darkest fat. The black Wagyu and Fleurance, on the other hand, tasted brighter and sweeter, and the appearance of their fat corresponded.
Something was going on with the fat. It didn’t appear to be happening in the visible fat—the marbling or the trim—because it wasn’t colored. It had to be something else. But what?
I asked Bazinet. He thought it must be internal fat, either structural fat found in cell walls or fat stored as energy inside the muscle cells. Something in the grass the cows had eaten, it seemed, was making its way into the muscle.
Bazinet seems to be on to something. A British food scientist named Don Mottram concluded as much back in 1982. He conducted an experiment in which he removed various kinds of fat from beef, then cooked the beef and had a panel of thirteen people smell it to see if the aroma had changed. (He also put it through a chromatography machine, so as not to rely on smell alone.) When he removed the triglycerides—the kind of fat you find in marbling and trim—and cooked the beef, the smell was barely altered. Stripped of the marbling and trim, in other words, steak still smelled like steak. But when Mottram took out the structural fats—scientists call them phospholipids—and cooked the beef, suddenly it didn’t smell like steak anymore. It wasn’t as “meaty.” (There was two hundred times less 1-octen-3-ol. There were fewer alcohols and aliphatic aldehydes, but a rise in benzaldehyde levels.)
Mottram believes alpha-linolenic acid—the unsaturated omega-3 fatty acid found both in grass and in grass-fed beef—is the key. When combined with intense heat, protein, sugar, fat, and everything else you find in a steak, ALA is highly prone to forming the complex aromatic compounds associated with beefy flavor. ALA, in other words, comes alive during Maillard reactions.
In British meat and flavor science faculties, it is grass that equals flavor, not marbling. Mottram described the