Steak - Mark Schatzker [69]
Mario’s Podolica steaks feature close to zero marbling. We bought them at the family butcher shop in Agropoli called U’ Ruscignuolo, where the butcher is none other than Mario and Nicola’s mother. She hung the side of beef for three days, then cut steaks off the rib eye as we waited. (We did not specifically request rib eyes, incidentally; we asked for the best bisteccas she had, and rib eyes are what we got.)
As the cheese was curdling that afternoon, Tilde’s daughter, Wanda, asked a question of her mother—“Mama, are we going to marinate the steaks?”—that was met by a sharp “No!” in the kind of spontaneous spike of emotion that Italians, particularly southern ones, are famous for. Echoing Allen Williams, the disillusioned meat scientist, and Jim Cameron, the Scottish semen collector, Tilde insisted the Podolica steaks from Monte Tresino would take only salt. “I use sauce only if I know the beef is no good,” she explained. No salt may touch her steaks until they are done cooking, however, because to apply it earlier would, in Tilde’s words, “draw out the blood.”
For reasons I am unable to fathom, Tilde does not take due pride in her grill. “It is nothing,” she said, “compared to the grills of America.” The truth is that it’s much better than the grills of America. Its singular feature is the cooking grate itself, whose height can be adjusted by turning a crank. If the carbone is producing a thermal intensity appropriate to blacksmithing, it can be raised so that a large steak, or perhaps a leg of lamb, won’t itself be turned into carbone. If, on the other hand, the steak has been sliced thin and the idea is to sear both sides while leaving the middle rare, then the space between the grill and the coals can be made appropriately intimate. The Podolica steaks were sliced at two centimeters—just under an inch—and Tilde turned the crank until there was a space of three inches between the meat and the glowing coals beneath.
After having tasted a Podolica steak of Monte Tresino, I have this to say to the editors of Taurus International: it could have been a lot more tender. It failed Laurent Vernet’s test, which is to say that once you reached the point where you felt like swallowing, you still had a fair bit of chewing ahead of you. But I would also say this: Podolica steak from Monte Tresino is darn tasty. It possesses a gentle and sweet, even floral, flavor, with the same caramel note that’s evident in the milk. (It is likely strange to read that a steak tastes of caramel, but the effect is much better than you might imagine.) It didn’t have anything close to the intensity or sustain of Angus Mackay’s Highland—the flavor curve dropped off the table, comparatively speaking. But it was good. In order to compare, Tilde also cooked a generic butcher-shop T-bone, and it tasted like water, only a lot drier. The T-bone was more tender. But what is tenderness without flavor? The answer: a steak that needs sauce.
Despite the weeks the Podolicas had spent in the barn eating hay and grain, something of Monte Tresino remained in the steak. This excited Tilde greatly. When she put the first bite in her mouth, she had a look of disbelief that melted into a smile. She had found what she is always looking for. She pointed at the steak and said, “Mark, this is a pure savor.”
Pure savor means pure flavor. Pure savors are what Tilde has