Steak - Mark Schatzker [90]
CHAPTER SIX
ARGENTINA
I had, by this point, crisscrossed the Atlantic Ocean three times, the Pacific Ocean once, and logged more than forty-five thousand miles, consuming somewhere on the order of fifty pounds of steak. Some of it was lean, and some was jubilantly fatty. Some of it was rare, most was medium, and the odd steak was well done.
There was, however, one steak that I could not get out of my head: that red slice of Scottish loin from the banks of the river Earn, barely marbled, silky even when raw, its fat the color of butter. Angus Mackay’s Highland rib eye was the most flavorful steak I’d ever eaten. It was also the juiciest steak I’d ever eaten, and the tenderest, too. But I didn’t think of it in terms of a score or technical superiority. What I remembered about that steak was the way it made me feel.
I would find myself stuck in traffic or falling asleep in bed at night, and my thoughts would turn to that meal and those furry cows with big horns grazing the green Scottish pasture. The memory invariably made me hungry. Eating the steak had changed me. I remember the thrill it gave me the same way I remember being kissed by a girl for the first time (in grade nine, in the back of a rented limousine on the way to a semi-formal dance), or what it felt like to ski through chest-deep powder for the very first time. A simple piece of meat from a Scottish farmers’ market had become almost mythical to me. I would sometimes wonder, Did that steak actually happen? But I snapped photos of that rib eye, and I would look at them from time to time to remind myself that it wasn’t all just a dream. The photos, predictably, caused meat hunger. I wanted to eat that steak again.
What would West Texas think of Angus Mackay’s Highland rib eye? It ran counter to everything the faculty of meat science at Texas Tech stood for. The steer it came from didn’t eat so much as a kernel of corn, and its meat was hardly marbled. During its last winter, it ate hay, but in rainy Scotland hay isn’t always good, so it also got a little barley—four pounds a day, at most, which is little more than a treat compared to the troughs of corn you find in a feedlot. For the last two months of its life, it ate nothing but grass. According to American meat science orthodoxy, it should have tasted terrible. It did not. And that meant Allen Williams—the disillusioned meat scientist I had met in Kansas—was right: grass does make for the best-tasting steak.
Williams is not the only one who believes this. Jim Cameron, the Scottish semen collector, says the best steak he ever ate—that Welsh Black strip loin that his fork “just fell through”—ate nothing but grass. I received the same gospel message at the Champany Inn, which is the best steak house in Scotland and one of the nicest on the planet. (A battalion of single malts stands at the ready behind the bar, above which hangs a diorama of a stuffed fox trotting away with a dead rabbit in its mouth.) The owner is a South African steak fiend named Clive Davidson, and he let me in on what he believed to be the secret to beef flavor: “It’s the grass”—something to do, he said, with chlorophyll making beef taste good. At the Sagra della Bistecca in Cortona, after 2,500 steaks had been reduced to a midden of bones and everyone was dancing arm in arm to a man playing a Roland E-500 keyboard and crooning Italian pop, one of the organizers pulled me aside to talk. His great regret, he told me in a hushed voice, as though he were worried that