Steak - Mark Schatzker [54]
Steak can also cause a metallic taste in the mouth, though he classifies this as a feeling rather than a flavor. “It’s like in the morning, when you take a spoon and touch it to your teeth. There is no scientific explanation why this happens, but it does. In my experience,” he went on, “it is related to the age and sex of the animal. You find it with males who have not been properly castrated, or a very young heifer or a young bull. You do not get it from a steer. It’s also related to beef that has been vacuum packed.
“I only use iron pans,” Vernet said as he reached for one and then repeated, “Only.” This was a griddle pan with ridges running across its bottom. “A flat pan is okay,” he conceded, “but if the steak is going to give a lot of juice—a skirt steak or rump steak that has been vacuum packed, for instance—then the water will come between the meat and the pan and cause boiled flavors.”
Vernet puts no oil or butter in his pan. He says that even a lean steak possesses enough fat to lubricate the cooking process. During a tasting, he will not salt his steaks, either before or after cooking, nor will he allow any other form of flavoring to be added. He considers steak sauce and “au jus” to be egregious sins. In order to keep the palate clean, he says, it is inadvisable to eat meat for twenty-four hours before a tasting. Between steaks, he clears his palate with warm filtered tap water. He set a glass down in front of me. Cold water, he said, “anesthetizes” the tongue, and mineral water is too sweet.
When the pan was hot, Vernet laid the first steak across the ridges. It was one of three leaner steaks, a lighter red than the others, from a cow that was half Charolais. I expected it to stick to the pan and burn, but it called upon some invisible reserve of fat, and when Vernet flipped it, the steak was a gorgeous, even brown. “There is fat in the muscle, even if you can’t see it,” he said. He cooked it to medium rare—about 60°C (140°F)—which Vernet believes to be the ideal doneness. “If it’s rare, you don’t get enough flavor. If it’s well done, it’s too dry.”
The moment of tasting was approaching. I cleansed my mouth with warm filtered water, cut a triangular morsel of Charolais steak, put it in my mouth, and crushed it between two molars. Juices were released. Texture was experienced. Sugars, peptides, acids, and salts landed on my taste buds. Esters, ketones, aldehydes, benzenoids, lactones drifted into my nose. Neurons fired. A flavor image appeared in my brain. I now had to describe it.
Vernet told me to go with my first impression. “Don’t think about it too much,” he said. I thought about it too much. Sitting in the kitchen of a professional meat taster makes it difficult to know just what to say about the meat that is in your mouth. The temptation is to just stick with tap water.
At the best of times, language is ill equipped to describe experiences of the senses. How, for example, would you describe what an orange looks like to a blind person? How would you describe the way an orange tastes to someone who’d never eaten one? You might say it’s sweet and juicy and just a little sour, but this description applies to almost any fruit, and there’s nothing distinctively orangey about it. Someone once quipped that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and the sentiment applies equally to using words to describe food.
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