Steak - Mark Schatzker [63]
The juiciness begged credulity. It seemed impossible that a piece of meat so small could contain such a volume of liquid. A man lost for days in the desert, it seemed, could be rehydrated with a single Angus Mackay Highland steak. Its tenderness was equally astonishing. I was able to cut my rib eye with the side of my fork. I discarded my knife and sliced into it as though I was eating cheesecake.
Did it all come down, finally, to breed? Perhaps. Mackay takes the subject seriously. Once upon a time, he raised Charolais cattle—a big, high-yield breed—but he was so put off by the amount of grain they needed that he set out to stock his farm with cattle that had not been “improved” by the hand of man. He settled on Highlands, because during the nineteenth-century boom in breed refinement, they were never tinkered with the way Dishley longhorns, shorthorns, Angus, and all the rest were. And for all the inside breeder talk of “purity” and “full-bloods,” almost every breed has been mixed with other breeds, at some point. Angus, the story goes, were crossed with red longhorns in an effort to bulk them up, and they forever carry this taint. Highlands, however, remain pure. They look and taste, Mackay says, like they did three hundred years ago.
Highlands remain pure in part because they are hard to sell in today’s yield-obsessed world. They’re small, they grow slowly, they’re too shaggy for the hot Texas sun, and their long horns would cause untold laceration in the close confines of a feedlot. Beef today is about selling as many pounds as possible, and Highlands give fewer pounds than a fast-growing Angus or a big Charolais. Highlands may be delicious, but they don’t make money.
There may be a scientific basis for the way a Highland steak tastes. About three hundred miles southeast of Mackay’s farm lives a professor of veterinary molecular medicine at the University of Nottingham named Kin-Chow Chang who has spent a great deal of time studying how muscles grow. The muscles that grow quickly, he told me over the phone, tend to be of the “fast-twitch” type, which are better for sudden and intense bursts of movement, such as sprinting. Unfortunately, they don’t taste very good, as they are thick and tough and their cells contain less myoglobin—the substance that makes red meat red. Slow-twitch muscles, on the other hand, are designed for sustained exertion. Unlike fast-twitch muscles, which use sugar as an energy source, slow-twitch muscles contain fat, and their fibers are smaller and finer than their fast-twitch cousins’. According to Chang, all those big, high-yielding continental breeds—Charolais, Limousins, and others—which were used for centuries to pull plows and haul enormous carts and have, more recently, been bred to grow astoundingly fast, contain lots of fast-twitch muscle fibers. Their steaks, therefore, are tougher and less flavorful than the steaks from smaller, finer-grained British cattle. It also means that all those high-performing muscle-bound Angus bulls pictured in the Aberdeen-Angus Review—with their high-priced semen that will produce similarly fast-growing progeny—will also produce tougher, less flavorful meat.
Angus Mackay’s Highland steak did have an undeniably fine grain to it. Of all the breeds I’d sampled, it possessed a distinctive and mouthfeel. Was its superiority simply a matter of fiber size? What about Angus Mackay’s ryegrass and clover pastures? Did this combination of alluvial soil—the fertile muck left behind by millennia of spring floodings—and those particular grasses make for sublime beef ? Or did I just happen to luck out with 502552/600084? Maybe he was an exemplary representative of the Highland breed, and I was comparing him to a merely average doddie?