Steak - Mark Schatzker [140]
After another two hours, we found ourselves on the crest of a ridge, high enough that magnificence spread out in every direction. The Pahsimeroi Valley rolled away beneath us, looking as if it was covered in horsehide, and off in the distance you could just make out Alderspring Ranch. The sun was blazing, a breeze was blowing, and a few hundred feet in front of us a golden eagle was soaring. On the other side of the valley, the tops of the Lemhi Mountains were covered in snow that, even in July, looked as thick as toothpaste.
A cow mooed. Then another. The slope was steep, and the herd was somewhere below us. If they headed downhill, we would have to loop around and come at them from below to chase them back up and over the ridge, through a gate into the next valley. It struck me as the kind of situation tailor-made for a spectacular wipeout. Our horses broke into a gallop. The cows bolted. They were aware of the plan, evidently, because they made directly for the gate. All we had to do was run up behind them and shut it.
The sun was low in the sky by the time we got back to the ranch. Elzinga made a fire in an outdoor grill from some old, dried-out fence posts, explaining, “You get a good smoke.” Before he laid a steak on the grill, he put a sheet of black iron over it, because Elzinga does not believe in grills. He thinks too much moisture drips away between the slats. I believe he is wrong about this, but I am no enemy of a pan, or sheet iron, for that matter.
Nearer the river, cattle were grazing and slapping flies with their tails. The grass grows well at Alderspring Ranch because the soil is thick with minerals like calcium and magnesium. The West has always had a reputation for good steak, and some argue that it’s because back when American cows ate grass, the mineralized soils of the mountainous West produced better-tasting meat.
Three hundred and fifty million years ago, Alderspring Ranch was under fifty feet of warm seawater. The land was then pancake-flat, but that changed fifty million years ago when the Pacific Plate collided with the North American Plate and caused what geologists, who have a great gift for understatement, call “uplift.” Volcanoes burbled mineral-rich lava for millions of years. Mountains made of ancient, dead marine creatures rose from the ground and reached high into the sky. Millennia of glaciers, snowmelt, rain, and wind have moved all that lava, limestone, dolomite, and quartz—grain by grain, pebble by pebble—down into the valley. The roots of Elzinga’s grasses needle their way through it, nourishing themselves on minerals, water, and sun.
We talked genetics. Elzinga used to have three Limousin cows, but their offspring were never tender, so he sent them down the road. Elzinga doesn’t own an ultrasound machine, so his diagnostic instrument of choice is his mouth. He eats at least one strip loin off each cow. Lack of flavor is hardly ever an issue. Very rarely, tenderness isn’t what it should be; he won’t sell those steaks. Elzinga has been culling a cow here and there over the years, pushing the herd’s genetic makeup in the right direction. In twenty years, he figures he’ll have the herd he wants. The one he has, however, tastes very good.
The sheet of iron was now so hot that he poured water on it to cool it down, for fear that the meat would burst into flame. The water did not even dance on the hot metal. It turned instantly into steam and drifted away.
Two handpicked rib eyes were sitting on a plate facing a sky that was nearing them in color. Elzinga loves skirt steaks, culottes, hanger steaks, shoulder tenders, rump steaks, you name it. The only cuts he doesn’t have time for are “those super-duper lean jobbers, like tenderloins or London broils.” Rib eyes, however, hold a special spot in his heart, and another in his stomach.
The ones sitting on that plate were marbled enough to grade high Choice. More than half