Steak - Mark Schatzker [41]
“I think one can find perfection,” was his reply.
Finding perfection is Christophe’s mission. To hear him describe it, good chefs face an ever-worsening scarcity of excellent ingredients. The actual cooking part of cooking, he claims, is easy. Acquiring good ingredients is the big challenge, even in France where supermarkets sell Label Rouge chickens, which are slow-growing varieties raised in smaller flocks and reared for almost twice as long as regular chickens, although an even rarer and more expensive French chicken called poulet de Bresse is considered more tender and fine-tasting. Buying seafood, Christophe told me, can be very dicey, unless you know who to talk to—a man named Bataille, apparently, who has a line on extremely fresh turbot, cod, sole, and the like. Beef is a different matter, however. According to Christophe, buying beef in France is like dealing with the Mafia. Even when you pay top euro, you cannot trust what you’ll get. A chef friend of Christophe’s was assured he was buying good French beef, but when he began cutting it, he discovered a stamp proclaiming it was of Brazilian origin.
Christophe does have a beef wholesaler he likes, a man named Olivier Metzger, who, if there were ever a competition to determine the world’s best-dressed beef wholesaler, would be the odds-on favorite to win. The three of us sat down out front of a little sausage shop called La Maison Pierre Oteiza, eating rounds of Basque salami that Christophe holds in high esteem. Monsieur Metzger’s level of chic exceeded the Parisian standard walking by on boulevard Saint-Michel. He wore a red-and-white-checked shirt, a black jean jacket, and, on his wrist, a silver Cartier Pasha Seatimer watch of obvious preciousness. Metzger talked up a breed called Simmental—big red-and-white cows that originated in Switzerland but are now popular all over Europe. The thing to look for, he said, was an old Simmental, and it is here that the French taste in beef diverges from the USDA’s. The USDA takes a dim view of mature beef. After marbling, age is the next highest priority on a USDA grader’s list. A grader can cut into a loin and find it so marbled as to look like a snowstorm wrapped in fat, but if the carcass shows signs of age, it won’t make Prime.
The French, in contrast, consider beef younger than two years old to be insipid. Metzger told me that as cattle mature, they develop more myoglobin in their muscles—redder meat, in other words—and that the flavor is, for this reason, improved. He does not discount marbling, though he estimates that a meager 2 percent of French cattle are finished properly. It wasn’t always this bad. “Twenty years ago,” he said, “the beef was better because the farms were smaller,” sounding the same nostalgic lament as Christophe. “Now they just want to make money.” Even more troubling, the decline in quality has gone unnoticed by the latest generation of French chefs. “All they care about is tender meat. They don’t know what flavor is anymore.”
For Metzger, a flavorful cow could be as old as ten, maybe eleven years old—decrepit by USDA standards. American commodity beef, he believes, is too young. “They produce a standard product,” he said. “But not a gastronomique product.”
The next morning we returned to the ADF, where Christophe wanted me to taste another gastronomique product: steak in hay sauce.