Steak - Mark Schatzker [18]
Williams wasn’t interested in eating his steak so much as looking at it. By its size, he could tell it had come off a cow with at least some continental genetics, because cattle breeds from continental Europe—which all have exotic-sounding names like Charolais, Simmental, and Limousin—are bigger and grow faster than cattle from the British Isles. He stared at his plate, and then at mine. “My rib eye was cut closer to the chuck, and yours was cut closer to the loin,” he said. “Always take the rib eye closer to the chuck.” The reason for his preference is that there’s more spinalis and multifidus at the chuck end. (The chuck is butcher talk for the shoulder.) A rib eye consists of a circle of muscle called the longissimus, which runs all the way along a cow’s spine. Sitting on the longissimus like a thatch are the cap muscles, the spinalis and the multifidus lumborum thoracis. The two latter muscles, Williams claimed, are among the most tender and flavorful on a carcass. “The fibers are flat, and flat fibers have lower shear force tests.”
When Williams finally bit into his steak, he had this to say: “My longissimus is pretty chewy.” But if chewiness is a consequence of low-cost beef, there is a low-cost solution. It’s called tenderizing, and Williams described the surprising number of ways in which chewiness can be removed from beef. One method is called blade tenderization. A steak is sent on a conveyor belt and, at a certain point, slammed from above by a bed of needles. It still looks like a steak but is now as perforated as a kitchen sieve. Sometimes entire sides of tough beef are electroshocked, which likewise destroys muscle fibers. “They give it a good jolt,” Williams explained, “and the whole side of beef will jump.” Another way around the problem is to soak the steaks in enzymatic brine. (I later came across a frozen steak from Walmart with a label that read, “tenderized with ficin and bromelain,” both of which are enzymes that break down protein.)
Williams despises all such methods. “If you’ve ever eaten a steak that tasted mushy, it was because it was tenderized.” He had nothing good to say about the major steak house chains, either, and pointed out that all of them—even the expensive ones, which supposedly serve steaks of unparalleled quality—use commodity beef.
And yet, for a man so appalled by the current state of steak, it remains his favorite meat. He is as beef loyal as they come, eating steak three times a week, with no plans to stop. Unprompted, he began talking about how much he loves the rib eye’s cap muscles. “I’ve always wanted to take the cap, unwrap it from the longissimus, and make it its own steak,” he said, sounding as dreamy as a former college wrestler can sound. “That would be the best steak. There’s no question about it.”
The discourse on terrible steak continued at a nearby sports bar called Hoops, where nine television screens were displaying all manner of competitive team activity, none of which involved meat judging. We sat on stools at a round table in the glow of televised women’s college basketball. “Now comes the part I hate about eating a grain-fed steak,” Williams said. “I feel heavy, almost sick. We have just consumed a lot of saturated fat. Now that absorption has started, we’re feeling the impact. I want to cleanse my mouth.”
I decided to cleanse mine with a glass of red wine. At a sports bar in small-town Oklahoma I was offered a choice of merlot, cabernet sauvignon, or zinfandel. As I sipped cabernet sauvignon, Williams talked. He told me that beef was symptomatic of an agricultural sector gone wrong. “We’re trying to grow everything too fast. Not just beef, but chicken, pork, fruit. The new varieties all grow too quickly to ever develop a flavor profile. Peaches are all rock-hard and have no aroma. A peach with no aroma—what the heck is that? You should be