Steak - Mark Schatzker [40]
It was tasty, too, but that had to do with the spices, egg, mustard, and other ingredients that had been added to it. Raw steak on its own is bland, tasting gently of blood and not much else. This culinary fact is something Magdalenian Woman could have told you because she did not eat her aurochs raw. Even monkeys—who do not, as a rule, know how to cook—prefer the taste of cooked beef to raw beef. Cooking is what gives steak its flavor. Cooking makes sweet things sweeter and meaty things meatier. We seem to have been designed to prefer cooked food long before we developed the concept of medium rare. When humans discovered fire, their world became more delicious.
Steak tartare, being raw, is not heated. But it is still steak. Better restaurants, Christophe assured me, use the tenderloin, of which there are two on a cow, each running along the underside of the spine. The tenderloin is the tenderest muscle on a cow, and the reason is that it is lazy. Its job consists of supporting the spine—posture, basically. It doesn’t do any of the heavy lifting, and that’s just what you want in a steak. Do not look for such toothsome muscles on or near the legs, because legs do the work on a cow, and those muscles feature thicker, tougher fibers as well as more connective tissue—the silvery white sheetlike substance that holds everything together and is extremely hard on the jaw.
Arguments about steak always circle around protein and fat, but there is more water in steak than anything else by a country mile. Meat consists of bundles of muscle fibers wrapped in connective tissue with a dappling of fat. All that water is locked inside muscle, and good luck getting it out. The reason the steak tartare tasted silky was because no matter how much pressure my molars exerted—up to 300 pounds per square inch—the water stayed locked in the steak. If you want to get it out, you need heat.
That heat was in the kitchen, being applied to my entrecôte—which comes from a long muscle running along the top of a cow’s backbone. As I swallowed forkfuls of tartare and sautéed potatoes, heat was causing that muscle to contract one final time. Proteins were denaturing. Connective tissue was tightening, squeezing out liquid, which dripped onto the hot grill and evaporated instantly, creating the sound we call sizzle. Heat makes meat juicier and easier to chew, but only to a point. Adding more heat does not always equal easier chewing. If you keep a steak on heat too long, its juice will all be squeezed out, and the meat will stiffen and shrink to the point that eating it is like chewing on a muscle cramp. The only remedy is many more hours of heat, which slowly unwinds the proteins and makes the steak chewable again, at which point it isn’t steak anymore—it’s stew.
While too much heat will eventually ruin every steak, a certain amount is nevertheless necessary if you want the steak to brown. People think the reason you brown a steak is to “seal” the juices inside, but this is a myth: if a steak were perfectly sealed, no water would be released, period, and there wouldn’t be any sizzle. The truth is exponentially more exciting. The process of browning—known to food scientists as the Maillard reaction—recombines sugars and amino acids into hundreds of complex chemicals, which later recombine with fats and carbohydrates into yet more chemicals. The brown crust, simply, is delicious.
The French prefer their steak well browned on the outside, but just barely starting to leak on the inside. The word for a steak like this in English is “rare.” The French