Steak - Mark Schatzker [142]
I would like to tell you how that steak tasted, but the truth is, we lack an adequate meat vocabulary. The flavor that burst over my tongue with each chew was comparable to a symphony, but any attempt to describe the individual notes would sound pretentious and be meaningless, I fear. As I ate, I thought about Fleurance and the near trance she entered while chomping that apple back in Carla’s barn. That’s how I felt now. My mouth wasn’t in the mood to form syllables. It wanted to chew. I let it.
What I can tell you about that steak is how it made me feel. The flavor reached deep into my subcortex and uncorked a sensation that bubbled up and drowned out every other thought, concern, and anxiety drifting through the chaos and endless dialogue that rage in the mind. I chewed, swallowed, cut more steak, and chewed, sustaining my state of mind with each bite. It is the feeling that no human, or animal, for that matter, ever tires of experiencing. It is a feeling that makes life, for all its pain, frustration, and sadness, worth living. The feeling is joy.
AFTERWORD
A few weeks after the final character of the book you see before you was typed—a period, predictably—I found myself in a bar talking to a lawyer friend. He couldn’t wait to read my book about steak, he told me, because he was, as he put it, “really looking forward to finally learning how to properly cook one.”
He then launched into a description perhaps too rich in detail of the various ways he and his wife had desecrated countless expensive beef cuts over the years. I barely took in a word. In my head, I was scanning over the roughly 106,000 words I had written over the preceding months. Nowhere among them was there what you would call a recipe for cooking steak. Apparently, How do you cook a steak? was the big question people wanted answered. (In my friend’s case, the only question.) A book entitled Steak, you might think, would answer it. But it did not.
Cooking a steak is simpler than boiling an egg, yet somehow it remains a feat everyone from lawyers to steak house chefs gets wrong with regularity. So, from someone who’s both witnessed the cooking of steak and cooked rather a lot of steaks himself over the past many years, here is a step-by-step guide.
How to Cook a Steak in 15 Easy Steps
1 steak
salt
heat
Serves 1
Step 1. Find a source of tender, juicy, and, above all, flavorful steak (by far the most difficult step in this recipe). Frozen steak is fine, so long as it’s good frozen steak.
Step 2. Decide on a cut.
There is a rather large selection to choose from, as you will have noticed: strips, flank steaks, rump steaks, tenderloins, rib eyes, and so forth. And don’t forget about those rare “butcher’s cuts.” At least once a year, every men’s magazine will run a story on steak that tells you, in the coolest language the writer can muster, that these are the cuts that steak insiders eat, and that by putting a skirt steak, hanger steak, or flatiron steak on your grill, you will distinguish yourself from the strip-loin-consuming masses and attain the dude-simple purity of a cattle rancher or an old-time New York butcher.
My guess is that you’ll like a rib eye most of all. But here’s a little secret for you: they’re all good. So long as you follow Step 1, that is. Every steak cut is delicious, and some of the “braising” cuts are, too. Try them all. Get to know each cut as intimately as your pillow. If you follow Step 1, any and every cut you get will be eminently palatable. But follow Step 1.
Step 3. Choose a thickness.
Don’t fall into the trap of believing that bigger steaks are always better. Thin steaks are plenty good, too. You just need to cook them properly, on a very hot surface, so that you can brown the outside without overcooking