Steak - Mark Schatzker [98]
It appeared as though the gaucho was trying to kill the heifer, but he was doing just the opposite. The tip of his knife punctured her hide and entered her pressurized rumen. When he pulled it out, gas-propelled alfalfa began spurting out, accumulating on the ground in a green, gooey mound. The heifer, looking relieved, sat there with her front legs splayed, like a cat, taking satisfying breaths of air as the alfalfa froth slowed to trickle and then a burble. A few other heifers walked over to have a look, sniffing the half-digested alfalfa, as though considering whether or not to take a bite, then sniffed their friend and walked off. According to Pordomingo, the heifer would likely make a full recovery.
Alfalfa bloat can be prevented in two ways. Either you can feed cattle the same antibiotic they get in feedlots, which is called Rumensin, and which kills gas-producing bacteria in the rumen, or you can cut the intensity of the alfalfa by planting some other grasses with it. This, of course, will reduce the output of the field, so for many Argentines it’s easier and more profitable to grow lots of alfalfa and arm their gauchos with knives.
Alfalfa wasn’t the only reason these cows had grown so big so quickly. Ranchers, Pordomingo explained, had gotten a lot better at choosing bulls that sired fast-growing calves. Like the Angus bulls advertised in the Aberdeen-Angus Review, these cattle got big in a hurry. As far as the ultimate effects on steak quality, Pordomingo was not enthusiastic.
For lunch, he intentionally took me to a restaurant that didn’t do a lot of business, and so didn’t have access to all that young, fast-grown beef. It was called Parador El Encuentro, and I walked in with my shoe and the cuff of my pants still covered in abono. We sat under a big air conditioner. At the far end of the room, most of the diners were gathered at a table near a big TV that was showing a daytime soap. Below the TV was yet another salad/tongue bar. “My hunch is that we’ll get older meat here,” Pordomingo said.
The steaks were a cut I had never heard of, aguja, which comes from the neck. Old neck meat, I suspected, would make for terrible steak, but I was wrong. That aguja turned out to be the best steak I’d eaten in Argentina—tender, smooth, but, most important, beefy. Pordomingo chewed, paused, and said, “They call this ‘country flavor.’ ” It tasted, he explained, like the Argentine steak of ten years ago. I plowed through mine, flagged down the waitress, and ordered a rib eye. If the neck tasted this good, I could only imagine how good a rib eye would be.
I would never find out. We had driven so far north that we’d drifted into Córdoba Province, which is in a different time zone. The kitchen was closed, the waitress informed us. The asador had gone home, and the wood in the parilla had turned to ash.
I had been denied steak by a time zone. An artificial line drawn by the hand of man had taken potentially the best rib eye of my life out of my mouth, leaving a hole in my stomach that ached to be filled. I decided then and there to fill it at the best parilla in Santa Rosa. That evening, I would order a gargantuan rib eye. Now that I’d found Argentina’s delicious grass-fed beef, it was time to really start eating.
My running total of steak consumption over four days was approaching three pounds. Stretched out to a year, that would amount to 275 pounds—not even double the Argentine average. It’s hard to feel guilty about eating too much steak in Argentina. It’s even harder after meeting Anibal Pordomingo’s father, José Pordomingo.
He was sitting in his garden next to his parilla when I met him, looking distinguished, with a gray comb-over suggestive of inner youth. He was eighty years and two months old, with a mind that remains so sharp that when his son forgets a phone number, he phones his father, who may as well work for directory assistance. Physically, José Pordomingo