Steak - Mark Schatzker [72]
Tilde seemed to know this without having ever heard the words “calpain enzymes.” She finished her steak and said, “The frolatura was perfect, and the cooking was perfect.” But she then added: “It did not have the flavor of the Podolica.” This could be taken as yet another instance of Italian tribalism. Every region, town, and household in Italy, after all, thinks its foods and recipes are superior. But I am not from Italy, and I say Tilde had it right.
We ate peaches for dessert. Everyone peeled his, but I ate mine skin on, and so did Tilde. The flesh was a little firm, and not as sweet or juicy as peaches are supposed to be. Tilde took a bite and observed, “The frolatura was not long enough.”
Chianina beef, despite its excellence, won’t win any admirers at the USDA any time soon. It’s too lean. The breed marbles as poorly as any, resulting in a steak that is an uninterrupted stretch of red. Most would grade it Select, or worse, Standard, though Select is nothing to rave about. Chianina bistecas come from cows that are comparatively old, and the USDA does not look favorably on age. Americans prefer to kill their beef cattle at around fourteen to sixteen months, but in Italy, Chianinas are grown to twenty-two months, often much older.
According to a local bistecca enthusiast named Giancarlo Pretotto, this is precisely the reason they taste so good. “If you ate a Charolais or Limousin at twenty-two months old,” he told me, “they would taste good, too.” Pretotto is a Chianina farmer who lives on a two-thousand-acre property on the other side of the Val di Chiana, not far from a pretty and absurdly ancient village—though almost all Italian villages are absurdly ancient—called Gubbio. His barn could not be more different from the one near Agropoli. It is newer, wider, longer, taller, tidier, brighter, better organized, and mechanized. Where Mario feeds his cows with a bucket, Giancarlo Pretotto dispenses feed from a small tractor that runs up and down a central alley. His barn, in other words, is a northern Italian barn. About 300 cows and their calves live inside it, and 150 more, pregnant, wander his hills and graze.
Like Tilde and every other Italian, Pretotto takes enormous pride in all that is local, and very little in all that is not. We met at a restaurant on the outskirts of Gubbio and ate lasagne with truffles and mushrooms, a preparation called lasagne funghi e tartufo that he made a point of telling me you only find in places where white truffles are found—places like Gubbio. Pretotto’s cows enjoy a diet that is similarly regional: a mix of alfalfa, hay, corn, and barley, every stem and grain of which is harvested right on the farm, and soybeans, which are never genetically modified and, when possible, are grown in Italy. When his cows reach six months, they begin the finissagio, a drawn-out, eighteen-month-long session of fattening—almost four times as long as a standard American feedlot stint. The lengthy finissagio is due partly to the fact that Chianina are the world’s largest breed of cattle and need a long time to grow, and partly to the fact that Europe forbids the feeding of antibiotics to cattle and the injection of growth hormone pellets into their ears, but mainly because Italians like doing things the slow way—highway driving notwithstanding. A long, slow weight gain, Pretotto believes, makes the meat taste better.
Considering there are three hundred cattle defecating and farting under one roof, Pretotto’s barn smells surprisingly pleasant. You could stand next to a pen of Chianinas and eat a bowl of lasagne funghi e tartufo and not feel the slightest bit queasy, though you’d be a fool to do so, given that right outside the barn, which is perched on the side of a hill, a superb view awaits.