Steak - Mark Schatzker [52]
When I asked Honeyman to recommend a cut, he stopped me. He first had to determine if we were even speaking the same language. A sirloin in America, he cautioned, is not called a sirloin in Scotland, where requesting such will get you a rectangular-shaped steak that Americans call a strip loin (technically, part of the longissimus, whereas the American “sirloin” is usually cut off the glutius medius). He warned against the dangers of ordering a particular muscle in the rump, sometimes called the round, sometimes called the thick flank, but which goes by no fewer than twenty-nine different names in Britain. Honeyman could—and well might—write an ode to every cut of beef, but when asked to choose the greatest steak cut qua steak cut, his choice is the rib eye. “There is a lot of flavor there,” he explained. “There’s a lot of fat there, too. But texturally, it’s more open. It’s not as tightly grained.” The question of cut, nevertheless, is the last thing a steak buyer should worry about, according to Honeyman. “You’d be better off knowing what breed it came from,” he says, “and how it was raised.”
He disappeared into the fridge and emerged carrying four packages of steak, which he handed over to Vernet. We had the makings of what wine types call a horizontal tasting. During a horizontal tasting, wine lovers sit down with wines that are all from the same year (and often the same grape variety) but come from different wineries. As the wines are tasted and compared with one another, differences in geography and the wine-making art become more apparent. Our plan was to do the same thing with some Scottish steaks. (In a vertical tasting, wines from the same winery, but from different years, are sampled, so a person can see how a wine from, say, 2004 compares with one from 1968. Doing the equivalent with steak is not advisable.)
As we drove back to Edinburgh, Vernet and I discussed flavor. Vernet does not worship at the altar of marbling. He considers any steak with a USDA grade of mid-Choice and higher to be too fatty. Some marbling, he agrees, is necessary for a good steak. “But when a steak has too much fat,” he warned, “the only taste you register is neutral cooked oil.”
For Vernet, fat alone does not equal flavor. Science does not disagree. It is primarily amino acids and sugars—not fat—that are the constituents of Maillard reactions. But fat deserves some share of the credit, although it is incorrect to think of there being a single kind of fat in steak. There are at least twenty-five different fats, and more may yet be discovered. Technically, they are fatty acids and range from the highly unsaturated DHA—which is liquid at room temperature, found in abundance within the flesh of coldwater fish, and considered so healthy as to be sold as little gel pills in health food stores—all the way up to palmitic acid, whose every molecule has so many hydrogen atoms connected to it that scientists call it “saturated.” Palmitic acid is firm at room temperature and won’t melt until the thermometer reaches 63°C (145°F), whereas the fabulously unsaturated DHA melts at -45°C (-49°F).
The fourth most prevalent fatty acid in beef is called linoleic acid, and the heat of a grill or pan turns it into a substance called hexanal, which tastes “green,” “fatty,” and “oily” and, despite these less than appetizing associations, is considered delicious by food scientists. Hexanal is one of steak’s many “flavor compounds.” According to the food science database Volatile Compounds in Food, 340 such substances have been identified in grilled or roasted beef. Consider for a moment that red wine—a substance that has launched an entire genre of magazines, Web sites, and books devoted to printing descriptions of its flavor—has 386 flavor compounds, a mere 46 more than steak. (White wine, which most wine connoisseurs consider to be less sophisticated than red wine, has, unexpectedly, 687.) Many of the flavor compounds in steak do come from fat, but many come from other things—sugars, amino acids, peptides, proteins, even ammonia—that