Steak - Mark Schatzker [55]
In the 1970s a newer American system took hold, one that endeavored to be both more precise and more agricultural. Wines, which were products of the earth, were now described with reference to fruits, vegetables, and flowers—call it the pastoral language school of flavor description. Instead of saying a wine was callow and hot-tempered, you would instead observe that it had intense but fleeting notes of strawberries, black currants, and eucalyptus. And with good reason. Wines do taste and smell of fruits, vegetables, and flowers. The smell of roses, for example, is considered a telltale sign of red wines grown on a particular patch of soil in Burgundy, France, called La Tache. Malic acid, which you find in white wines, smells like green apples.
Even the most florid of pastoral descriptions, however, is usually followed by the thing everyone cares about most: the score. Most of the time, a wine is scored out of 100, though scores don’t tend to go below 50, so really they’re out of 50, although in a sense they’re only out of 30, because a score below 70 is extraordinarily rare—not to mention bad. Anything above 90 is considered very good. A score above 95 is excellent.
Vernet has applied the pastoral language approach to steak. He believes that, like wine, the flavor of steak is something like a symphony, and that individual notes can be distinguished and appreciated. How many notes? At least fifty-eight, judging by his scoring sheets. He uses these to assess each steak he tastes and keep a record of his findings. He handed me a stack, so that I could do the same.
The first table included the general category of “Smell,” which was, in turn, subdivided into “Fresh,” “Pleasant,” “Off,” and “Others,” all graded on a scale from 0 to 5. There followed “Juiciness,” “Tenderness,” and finally “Texture & feelings,” which judged “fibrousness,” “uniformity,” “Gristle,” “Connective tissues,” “pleasant,” “grain,” “Squeak,” “metallic,” and “Others.” And that was just the first table. There were three.
The second tracked flavor and was quite a bit more complicated. It started with the five basic tastes—sweet, salt, sour, bitter, and umami—which were followed by a long list of general flavor categories, themselves broken into more specific individual flavors. For example, “Green” ranged from “Cucumber” to “swamp,” “Green shoots,” “Green woods,” “forest,” and “Fresh cut tree.” There were, all together, thirteen broad flavor categories within which I could track a steak’s flavor. And finally, there was “Length,” which ranged from “None” to “flash,” “short,” “average,” “long,” and, last, “persistent.” A steak, presumably, could taste of cucumber and furniture, with a hint of hazelnuts, caramel, and clotted cream, but that flavor could last for no more than a flash.
A steak does not end at flavor for Vernet. The flavor box is repeated (more blood, more green, more earth)—this time, however, for “Aftertastes.” Wine lovers call this the finish, and a longer finish, so long as it is pleasant, is considered a good thing.
A second morsel of the Charolais cross was now in my mouth. I endeavored to distinguish the various notes and chart them in pencil. Under “Juiciness,” I noted the steak as being “juicy,” though the length of the juiciness was “short.” Fibrousness I put down as “string”—which isn’t as bad as it sounds—and uniformity as “irregular.” But when it came to flavor, I was stumped. I was tasting steak, and that steak tasted nice, perhaps very slightly sour. That was all I could say. I registered