Steak - Mark Schatzker [97]
The rib eye is Anibal Pordomingo’s favorite cut. Welcome to the club. I ordered one for dinner, and it was so colossal that it made every other rib eye I’ve ever eaten seem two-dimensional. The enormous hunk of flesh was served on a white plate just larger than a saucer, a plate that seemed intentionally small, so as to exaggerate the sheer size of the steak.
Like the steak I ate at lunch, initial juiciness was good but trailed off. It was the same story with flavor—quenching and grassy, but fleeting. I was not disappointed, however. The meal, which included fries and a good bottle of red Argentine wine, cost a little more than three McDonald’s Happy Meals back home but was exponentially more pleasurable.
The next morning, Pordomingo took me north to witness the agricultural engine that is the pampas turning at a higher rpm. He called out local forage as he drove—“Alfalfa . . . ryegrass”—reading the grassland the way a sailor reads the sky. One patch growing by the side of the road looked a little yellow. “Not green enough,” he observed. “Probably low in phosphorus.”
I brought up the delicate issue of the previous night’s less-than-outstanding steak. “The steak doesn’t taste as good as I expected,” I politely told him, which is to say it didn’t hold a candle to Angus Mackay’s Highland rib eye. Pordomingo wasn’t surprised. Argentine steak in general didn’t taste as good as he had expected, either.
The reasons were numerous. There was the weather, Pordomingo said, which was getting drier and drier, possibly due to global warming. For the last decade or so, Argentine beef cattle, he said, were slaughtered at a younger age, so that their meat now tasted more like veal—milder, more tender—than like beef. This trend was due in part to the cut in exports, which had made cash-pinched farmers try to fatten their cattle and move them to market in as little time as possible, the farming equivalent of just-in-time manufacturing. And then there was the problem of aging. In Argentina, aged beef is almost unheard of. Steaks from a cow slaughtered on a Monday can be in the butcher case by Thursday, giving the calpain enzymes hardly any time to break down fibers. There are people who will tell you that Argentines don’t believe in aging, that they prefer the taste of fresh beef. But the truth is, most Argentines have never heard of aged beef. Argentine consumers—steak addicts, all of them—don’t know that beef tastes better if it sits in the fridge for a week or two. They care only about the price, and aging makes the price go up.
More than two hours after setting out, we entered a zone of overcast drizzle not far from a town called Huinca Renancó. The fields rolling by became brighter and more verdant, with the alfalfa looking lush enough to toss with olive oil and vinegar. We pulled into one ranch where Angus heifers were grazing it hard. They were a long way from Scotland, but on pampa this moist the doddies had gotten fat by their fourteen-month birthday. A gaucho standing next to a wire fence was about to mount a magnificent-looking dun-colored horse to go check on the cattle. Instead, he hopped into the cab of Pordomingo’s truck, and we drove over alfalfa. The fields were strewn with soupy patties of manure as flat as dinner plates, the Argentinian term for which is abono. When we got out of the truck, Pordomingo and the gaucho walked in deep conversation, using some sixth sense to avoid the abono. I let my guard drop and planted my left foot directly into a patty, and the way it coated my shoe, I may as well have stepped in a bucket of spaghetti sauce.
One heifer had eaten too much alfalfa. It had overfermented in her rumen, inflating it like a balloon, and now it was so puffed out that it was pressing on her lungs and making it hard for her to breath. She lurched in circles, panting. The gaucho tried to walk her through it, but the heifer collapsed