Steak - Mark Schatzker [53]
There may be more than a hundred hydrocarbons in steak, to say nothing of the alcohols, aldehydes, ketones, esters, ethers, and amines. Oxazols and oxazolines are found in steak, and so are thiazols and thiazolenes. Butanoic acid, a rancid-tasting ester, lives in steak as well as in vomit, body odor, and Parmesan cheese. Too much butanoic acid in a steak is not good, nor is too much hexanoic acid, for that matter, which tastes sweaty and like barnyard animals. One-octen-3-ol, on the other hand, tastes mushroomy, and delta-nonalactone gives notes of sweet, dairy, and, oddly, waxiness. Decan-2-one tastes musty and fruity. Two-methyl- 3-[methylthio]furan tastes meaty, sweet, and sulfurous. Acetaldehyde, methylpropalan, and 3-methylbutanal are formed by amino acids. They taste meaty.
The juice that flows out of a steak is rich in umami, the savory tonic that quenches the craving for meat. While it is heat that releases the juice from steak, too much exposure to heat can release too much juice: a well-done steak has 80 percent less umami than one cooked to medium rare. (This might be taken as scientific proof that steak should not be cooked to well done.) Where a steak meets intense heat it turns brown—Maillard reactions—and here the chemistry of steak gives rise to a dizzying number of complex, and often delicious, chemicals: furanoids, for instance, carbonyl compounds, benzenoids, lactones, and sulfides. Certain substances—a few alkylpyrazines and some meaty-tasting hydroxyfuranones and thiamenes—are found in grilled or roasted beef and nothing else.
Scientists refer to these compounds as “volatile,” and for good reason. They don’t last very long. They are created by heat, and when heat is removed, many of the flavor compounds are, existentially speaking, on the brink. When a red wine is poured into a glass, oxygen begins reacting with its tannins and other chemicals, and the beverage is often considered to improve after being exposed to a little air. Wine “breathes.” Wine “opens up.” When a steak is taken off the grill and placed next to that wine, the rising steam announces its half-life. Flavor compounds are degrading, and unless it is eaten shortly, it is on its way to becoming cold steak. Heat cannot undo the damage, as reheated steak gives rise to a new class of flavor compounds that taste “warmed over.”
There is a big stainless steel vent in the middle of Laurent Vernet’s kitchen that rises up to the ceiling like a church steeple and evacuates the considerable quantity of evaporated grease and meat odor generated on his stovetop, sending it out into the Edinburgh air. The kitchen is big and bright, with windows that look out onto the Port of Leith and the police station where Inspector Rebus, hero of the Ian Rankin crime novels, solves mysteries. Occasionally, fans of the detective series ring Vernet’s doorbell and ask him if he has seen the fictional inspector lately. To date, he has not.
Vernet laid the steaks out on the counter so that they could reach room temperature before cooking. He considers this important for tenderness. “What you don’t want is a thermic shock,” he instructed, “which can cause a small bit of blood vessels to explode. Also, at cold temperatures, you block the enzyme that makes the meat tender.”
A disquisition on the texture of steak had commenced.
“There are two kinds of juiciness,” he continued. “You have volume of juiciness, and you have length of juiciness. If you take meat from South America that is hot boned”—sliced into cuts while the carcass is still warm—“it’s often very juicy, but after the second or third chew it’s dead dry. When that happens, you can be sure that there was a problem at the maturation level.” By this, he meant that the steak hadn’t been aged properly. “Nine times out of ten,” he said, “it will be imported beef. A normal steak should go up to five and six chews and remain juicy.”
Related to juiciness is tenderness, for which Vernet has an elegant definition: