Steak - Mark Schatzker [95]
The cattle had to go somewhere, and where they went was marginal land, land that had never been considered up to the task of finishing cattle. To get them fat, Argentines began herding them into pens and feeding them corn, which they now had in abundance.
It sounded like a crisis, all right. But thus far, the effects were still minor. I had heard that a couple of feedlots had sprung up on the pampas. This or that supermarket, people told me, was selling the odd feedlot steak. And yet here we were at Steve and Vicky’s favorite parilla, eating feedlot steak. Had I come too late?
I did what any sane steak lover would do. I climbed onto the upper floor of an overnight bus, reclined my chair as far as it would go, and headed into that ocean of grass. Buenos Aires, a city of thirteen million people and parillas numbering in the hundreds of thousands (if not millions), gave way to the real Argentina—an unending monotony of fields. Cattle would appear in huge herds, followed by fifteen minutes of prairie, then a field of lumped hayrolls as tall as a truck scattered right to the horizon. The road was a strip of tar and pebbles painted on a sea of green, and it seemed as if a change in tide would bring the pampas flooding across it. As the summer sky began to darken and more fields rolled by, I drifted off into sleep.
I woke in a city called Santa Rosa, the capital of the province of La Pampa and, more important, the home of a meat scientist and grazing expert named Dr. Anibal Pordomingo. He pulled up to my hotel in a dusty, mud-spattered Chevrolet pickup truck, and we headed straight for a butcher shop. There was no way of knowing what kind of beef a parilla might serve, but at a butcher shop we could inspect raw steaks, which could give some indication of their provenance. We stood in front of a refrigerated display case and looked at steaks that were not so much arranged as piled in a manner suggesting that a lot of product would soon be moved. The flesh was a deep red and the fat was sufficiently yellow that it would win zero admirers in Japan—which is to say, it had a mild hue that only appeared yellow next to something that was pure white. Pordomingo knew the butcher, who invited us back to look at a half carcass hanging by a hook from the ceiling. He appraised the exterior fat, which was off-white and had a slightly glossy sheen. The beef looked grass fed. But would it taste that way?
We ate lunch at Parilla Los Caldenses, a big, airy joint with yellow walls that is, in itself, worth the price of a plane ticket to Argentina for one simple and gratifying reason: seven dollars buys you all the steak you can eat. It also buys you theoretically infinite trips to the salad bar, which was, more accurately, a salad and tongue bar, the latter poached, sliced, and dressed in either oil or mayonnaise. Argentine tongue doesn’t approach Japanese tongue in quality, probably because poaching doesn’t approach grilling, but it is satisfying nevertheless and every salad bar should stock it.
Our daily vegetable quota filled, it was time for steak. A waiter approached the table with a stretch of short ribs off the asado. In this case, asado referred to the fire, which was burning in the next room, and the meat was hung from metal crosses next to it. It was just one among many controlled bonfires raging indoors all over Santa Rosa, not to mention Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Chaco, Mendoza, and every other city, town, hamlet, and village in Argentina. This is a country where it is common to pass a restaurant window at ten thirty in the morning and witness a grown man lighting a very large fire, a scene that anywhere else would look like arson. Later, the same man will punch metal spikes into the sand next to the fire and hang beef ribs off them, so that the meat may absorb quebracho essence and heat without dripping fat directly into the flames. Argentines have mastered the contained bonfire. They