Steak - Mark Schatzker [57]
How does purebred Aberdeen-Angus steak taste? Sour, almost to the point of ammonia. It began with the smell, which Vernet placed as “vinegar and cold sweat.” He registered lilac and jasmine, milk, and a gamy venison taste. I registered dank. It reminded me of sweaty blue cheese. And that was a big shame, because in every way other than flavor, it was excellent: tender, popping with juice, and silky.
I asked Vernet why he refuses salt during a tasting, given that almost everybody puts it on steak. Why not replicate real-world conditions in the lab? Vernet explained that he didn’t want to adulterate the taste in any way. He wanted to keep it pure. This is a man, after all, who won’t add so much as a teaspoon of butter to his steak pan.
Unlike Vernet, I am a Salt Loyal. Salt makes steak taste better, plain and simple. More to the point, salt adds more than saltiness to food. It is an amplifier of flavor. Salt brings out character. It has what science calls a synergizing effect. When salt is added to a solution of umami-flavored water, the umami flavor becomes magnified. (Umami, likewise, magnifies the flavor of salt, which is why you often find MSG in low-sodium canned soups.) There is also scientific evidence suggesting that salt amplifies other flavors, including sweet. Sprinkled judiciously, salt turns up flavor’s volume knob.
Now that the official portion of the tasting had concluded, I was free to adulterate. As Vernet cooked another Charolais rib eye and another purebred Angus rib eye, I broke out the salt. It did nothing to help the Angus rib eye. If anything, the sourness was more extreme. The steak now tasted like bad wine.
The Charolais was another story. As if to prove Vernet’s earlier directive to let steaks rest at room temperature before cooking, the now well-rested Charolais steak displayed a markedly different character than it had an hour earlier, even before so much as a grain of salt had been sprinkled on. It now smelled of almonds. Vernet registered it. More important, I registered it. The smell of almonds was unmistakable. The taste, too, was somewhat sweeter than before.
Then I sprinkled some salt, and the smell of almonds graduated from aroma to a faint but discernible flavor. The steak was sweeter, tangier, beefier, and deeper. The steak was delicious.
It would be a mistake, however, to say that the steak tasted like almonds. It tasted a lot more like a steak than like a nut, which brings us to what is, perhaps, the most serious problem with the pastoral language approach: Does it actually communicate anything? To those who never ate that Charolais cross, I can tell you that a pack of almonds is no substitute, and neither is “forest” or dry hazelnuts, just as eating wet leather rubbed with cherry blossoms and vanilla beans would tell you very little about a wine that is said to evoke those very notes. Wines don’t taste exactly like vanilla, cherry, wet leather, or whatever. They possess notes that gesture, sometimes quite forcefully, in that direction.
But all these notes—however powerful—don’t tell the whole story, and the reason is all the flavor notes we don’t have names for, the tastes and aromas in steak and wine that don’t resemble nuts, green shoots, liver, vanilla, forest berries, and so forth. What about them?
This may be why so much wine writing sounds ridiculous. Consider the following flavor description I once read in a magazine: “Herbaceous notes of cut grass and fruity undertones of stewed apple and overripe banana.” This was not, in fact, a description of a wine. It was not a description of a steak, either, or a fruit salad, or some blended health beverage meant to be consumed following yoga. It was a description of tap water. For those who have never tasted Toronto tap water but are curious about its flavor, I would say that putting cut grass, stewed apple, and overripe banana through a juicer will not result in a similar-tasting substance at all. This