Steak - Mark Schatzker [137]
Harold McGee, the author and expert on the chemistry of food, supports a different theory. In On Food and Cooking, he claims that what gives grass-fed beef its flavor is a substance called terpenes. Microorganisms in a cow’s rumen convert chlorophyll into these aromatic chemicals, which are related to the aroma compounds that give herbs and spices their intense flavor. (When people sprinkle spice rubs on feedlot steaks, they’re applying terpenes that should have been there in the first place.)
McGee’s theory resonates with the steak I’ve eaten—the best illustration being raw steak. When a feedlot steak is raw, it is almost totally without flavor. A raw grass-fed steak, on the other hand, has depth—not the depth of a cooked grass-fed steak, but enough flavor to enable you to taste and enjoy the meat you’re eating. There is no browned crust, obviously, in raw steak—no complex aromatic compounds, in other words—and therefore it cannot be the ALA providing all that flavor. It must be terpenes.
Judging by the rich color of Bazinet’s harvested fat samples, my guess is that there is even more than terpenes in grass-fed steak: flavonoids, carotenoids, and who knows what other kinds of ’oids. We can’t, as yet, call them out by name, but we can taste them.
Flavor, however, can’t simply be reduced to grass. I know this because three days after eating the Little House on the Prairie steaks, I ate another A-plus steak and scaled another lofty peak of gustatory fulfillment. This one came from a cow that had spent the summer mowing a verdant carpet growing in Idaho’s Pahsimeroi Valley. It had eaten basically the same kinds of grass as Tallgrass cows, and yet it tasted different.
That could only mean one thing: the flavor of those steaks wasn’t about the grass the cows ate so much as the soil that grass had been growing in: soil.
Glenn Elzinga is one of America’s last unironic cowboys. He wears a Stetson because it shields his face and neck from the sun when he’s on a horse, which is often. He wears cowboy boots because the heel stops his feet from slipping through a stirrup, and the tall, rigid sides protect his ankles and calves from rattlesnake strikes. He can tie a lasso and throw it around a horse’s neck, which is important, because otherwise he’d have a tough time wrangling his horse in the morning.
Elzinga owns a worn-out pair of chaps, pulls calves from mother cows struggling with birth, and rides up into range country once or twice a week with his lunch in a leather saddlebag. To properly experience a steak at Alderspring Ranch, he told me, would take two days. No restaurant has that kind of time to set the mood. Neither does Elzinga, who has a ranch to run, after all. But he made an exception for me.
And so it was that within minutes of parking my rental car, I found myself standing next to a man in a Stetson and boots and twirling a lasso above his head. A minute or two earlier, Elzinga’s horses had been standing with their noses to the ground happily eating grass, but now they were all wound up, running in circles around him and letting out the odd neigh. The only way he was going to halt one of those horses, it seemed obvious, was by landing the lasso around its neck. But each horse eventually slowed down and willingly took a halter. Except, that is, for a defiant chestnut mare named Missy, who had to be apprehended by rope. “This one’s your horse,” Elzinga said, turning to me. At twenty-six, she is the oldest horse I have ever met, but she was just a pretty young thing compared to Bonnie, a white and formerly wild thirty-five-year-old mustang that is so gentle a ride she is reserved exclusively for children.
Missy, Elzinga told me, had never fallen down, a fact that I found reassuring until one of Elzinga