Steak - Mark Schatzker [71]
A field of embers glowed yellow and white beneath the grill. Surrounding it stood eleven men, eight of whom were wearing white hair-nets and aprons, dodging billows of smoke, and turning steaks with pitchforks. Another man wheeled over cartfuls of carbone and added them to the inferno. (He shovels five hundred pounds an hour.) Another collected cooked steaks. Another Frisbeed raw steaks on the grill, tossing them with the grace and accuracy of a professional card dealer, ensuring maximal grill coverage at all times.
Over the three days of the sagra, some eight thousand people come to Cortona to eat bistecca. It is considered an important part of the local economy, according to Andrea Vignini, Cortona’s mayor, whom I found myself sitting next to. The Chianina cow, he explained, is deemed sacred. It was first raised by the Etruscans—the people who lived in Italy before the Romans—though it is unclear if they ate bistecca, which we know for certain has been enjoyed since the nineteenth century, but likely much longer. Spiritual ownership of the Chianina cow is a contentious matter. Cortona counts the cow as its own, but so do three other cities in the Val di Chiana. “In Cortona,” the mayor said, “the belief that the Chianina originates here is the only thing that unifies the left and the right.”
Before the bistecca arrived, we were served beans, sliced tomatoes, and bread, all on separate plates, the implication being that each should be enjoyed as a separate course. Service à la russe. Tilde tasted the beans and announced, “My recipe is completely different.” The Tuscan recipe, she diplomatically conceded, was good, but she disagreed with the use of tomatoes in the sauce. “We would only use oil, vinegar, and garlic,” she said, as always preferring her food as unencumbered as possible.
A heap of bisteccas arrived at the table, a teetering pile of one-and-a-quarter-inch T-bones sitting in a lake of juice deep enough to float a toy sailboat. By Tilde’s salt-only standards, they were seasoned liberally with salt and pepper and a few drops of olive oil, too. The steak had a crispy and delicious crust that protected a juicy and rare interior, and the charring was at its most pleasant on the perimeter of the steak, where, underneath, rested a soft layer of creamy white fat.
I have eaten more tender steaks in my life, but that didn’t bother me. At the time, I scrawled down the following notation in a juice-spattered notebook: “It’s nice to have a bit of chew, so long as it doesn’t dry out.” The Chianina bistecca did not dry out. It went down a whole lot easier than the Podolica steak, which was due in large part to a long frolatura—the Italian word for suspending a side of beef in a refrigerated room and leaving it for a while. The Scots call the process “hanging,” and North Americans call it dry aging. (You can also age beef by sealing whole cuts in plastic. This is called wet aging, and though purists don’t like it, some studies have found it to be superior to dry-aged beef.) The Podolica beef dry-aged for three days and the Chianina for three weeks. The process of aging is often likened to a controlled rot, but this is not true. The meat does not turn rancid—if it does, it’s ruined—and the tenderizing agent involved is not bacteria but a family of complex proteins called calpain enzymes. In living muscle, calpain enzymes break down proteins, so that they may be synthesized into newer proteins. When proteins are synthesized faster than they are broken down, a cow is gaining weight. In living muscle, calpain enzymes are controlled, but after death, they are free to break down proteins as they like. The longer meat sits, the more time calpain enzymes have to go around busting strands of muscle fiber, and the more tender the meat becomes. The more tasty it becomes, too, because as proteins are broken into amino acids, levels of umami rise. (Beef aged for seven days has been found to have more than double the glutamic acid