Steak - Mark Schatzker [3]
What is it about steak, for that matter, that makes people want to eat so much of it? Why did my father continue to grill it on a near-weekly basis, even though no steak ever measured up to that one he ate in 1963? I suffered from the same disease. Like some pale-faced slot machine addict, I kept exchanging money for steak, hoping to strike gold, but steak after steak said, “Better luck next time.”
Why was the meat all so bland? And what could account for those rare standout steaks? What made the Sierra Nevada steak my cousin ate in 1980 so different from those he’s eaten since? I couldn’t find any answer—not at my local butcher, not in the pages of cookbooks, and not, incidentally, among wine connoisseurs, all of whom are undiscerning steak eaters.
The world, it seemed, reserved its gustatory passion for things like single-cru soft-filtered olive oil, hundred-year-old balsamic vinegar, rare and exquisite Japanese sake, single-malt Scotch, fine port, and so forth. I knew of Italians who get into raised-voice arguments over buffalo-milk mozzarella versus cow-milk mozzarella, Spaniards who feed acorns to pigs to make the ham more delicious, and Americans who take barbecue so seriously it has become a competitive sport.
So what was going on with steak? Had modern agriculture bled the flavor out in the name of efficiency and profit margins? Was steak just one more thing that wasn’t as good as it used to be? Or was the reverse true? Had steak been improved and perfected to the point that we were all eating the red meat equivalent of single-cru soft-filtered olive oil, and I was just some gustatory outlier, someone who preferred Italian or Chilean steak the way others prefer French cars or Japanese vacuum cleaners?
Given that at any moment, I could step out my front door and within minutes find myself consuming beer from Germany, mushrooms from Croatia, fish sauce from Thailand, cigars from Cuba, or rum from Guatemala, the latter, surely, seemed more likely. If there was great steak out there, surely the forces of globalism would have found a way to put it on my plate. Like every other fine and expensive thing on the planet, it was just a matter of coming up with enough money.
But as I discovered in Mongolia, globalism missed the boat on mutton. This is the meat from a mature sheep, which the Western world gave up on long ago. (The only place it’s ever eaten these days is in nineteenth-century British novels.) The reason is that mutton is tough, with a taste so pungent as to be off-putting. Or so I was told. But two days after gnawing my way through that boot-tough steak in Mongolia, I found myself in a ger camp deep in the Mongolian hinterland preparing for a feast of mutton, which I presumed would be much worse than that steak. As the sky darkened, I sat in a tent and watched three Mongolian women prepare it in a traditional manner. They threw mutton chops into a huge wok, added potatoes, carrots, and salt and pepper, and then opened the door to a wood-burning stove and retrieved several intensely hot rocks, which were tossed in with the same nonchalance as the carrots and potatoes. The rocks were so hot that where they touched mutton bone, the bone burst into flame. Some water was added. A lid came down, and as the mutton cooked, I braced myself for awful meat. But that’s not how the mutton tasted. The chops were as tender as any lamb I’d ever eaten, but the flavor was richer, deeper, and better.
Mongolian mutton, I realized, was flying below everyone’s radar. Despite a world of meat eaters numbering in the billions and communication and distribution networks wrapping the planet like spider’s silk, I had to travel to Outer Mongolia to discover the joys of mutton chops.
Could the same be true of steak? Was there a land where all the beef was bursting with deliciousness, and the people ate nothing but good steak? Somewhere, there had to be someone who knew the secret to creating it.
That