Steak - Mark Schatzker [44]
Christophe Raoux was born with the sauce-making gift. His hay sauce is a credible version of liquid velvet. The taste was sweet and resonantly beefy, the distilled essence of the cow and the fields it lived in, the sun itself concentrated to the point of elixir. After my third bite, I turned to Christophe. “I understand now,” I said, pulling a finger through the sauce, which was so thick it parted like the Red Sea. I dabbed it on my tongue. “This,” I said, “is why cows eat hay.”
A cow had, until somewhat recently, been eating hay in the lower lefthand corner of France in a region called the French Basque Country. The next day, during lunch, I ate a section of its strip loin, and it was the best steak I have ever eaten in France. The strip loin—three-quarters of an inch thick, on the rare side of medium rare—was cooked at a restaurant called Café Constant. It is not one of Ducasse’s many excellent Paris restaurants, but as we walked in, Christophe assured me the food would be good.
The steak at Café Constant was pan-fried in olive oil and butter, and when it was done cooking, the chef fried a diced shallot and chopped parsley in the remaining pan juice, then poured it over the meat. As sauces go, it had nothing on Christophe’s hay sauce, but it was in no way an attempt to outdo it—it was just a simple lunch steak, one that was tender and full of flavor that lasted many seconds after swallowing. Did the flavor come from the shallot and parsley? The thought occurred to me. But it was too beefy to have come from a plant.
Alain Ducasse is a remarkable man. He rose from modest beginnings in the south of France—surviving a plane crash in 1984 that killed every passenger but him—and went on to become one of the most successful French chefs of all time. And yet his fourteen Michelin stars have in no way insulated him from the world inhabited by ordinary people, the vast majority of whom, like me, have no Michelin stars. I know this to be true because as I took another bite of that Basque Country steak, Ducasse swept into the room and sat down across from me, next to Christophe. He wanted to talk about steak. “Everyone thinks they have the best beef,” Ducasse said. “I’ve eaten steak all over the world. Bistecca in Italy. Kobe beef in Japan. Big, thick steaks in America. It is all good,” he said. “The point,” he insisted, “is not to say which one is better or worse. Each steak is a different pleasure.”
As I sat there chewing one such particular pleasure, it dawned on me that my ambition of seeking out the world’s very best, tastiest, most wonderful steak was narrow and single-minded, perhaps even stupid. In France, I had already eaten three good steaks—the aurochs, Christophe’s tenderloin in hay sauce, and the partly eaten strip loin in front of me. This last steak was the best of them all, but I wasn’t about to say the others should be vanquished from the earth forever. They were good. They deserved places on menus and space in the mouths of humans.
I thought about commodity beef. Ducasse said each steak was a different pleasure. Did commodity beef possess any significant or worthy difference to speak of? Compared to the steaks in France—not all of which are good, by the way—the one noteworthy quality of commodity beef seemed to be its absence of qualities. It was like tap water: abundant, dependable, cheap, and uninteresting. So I asked Ducasse, who runs two restaurants in New York City and one in Las Vegas, what he thought of the generic industrial beef. “This is the American way,” he said. It was what distinguished American steaks, he said, from French, Japanese, and Italian steaks, but I couldn’t tell if Ducasse thought that was a good thing or not. “The challenge we have today,” he said, taking a philosophical turn, “is to celebrate those differences.”
These were the words of a man who’d eaten more, better steak than I had. There was a lot of good, different, unique, and individual steak out there in the big wide world, waiting to be eaten. That’s hardly