The iconic Prause Meat Market in La Grange, Texas

CHAPTER 2

Buying Steaks

Figuring out how and where to get the best steaks can be a dizzying experience. Well, it can also be a darn simple experience. One thing’s for sure: finding the best steaks becomes more and more complicated and more confusing the farther away from the actual producer you get. In Texas, Aaron is lucky to have access to Dai Due, Lee’s, and Salt & Time (more on Salt & Time in the next chapter). In California, Jordan has Olivier’s, 4505 Meats, Clove and Hoof, and the Fatted Calf. The most common ways we Americans find steaks these days are via three main methods: straight from the rancher or farmer, from a butcher or other curator, and through some sort of branded program (or just from your local grocery store). Each has its pros and cons, always involving that all-important connection to the source.

The farther you get from the ranch, the more the quality of the beef declines. And when there’s no way of determining the source or even who’s selling the meat or where it’s from, it’s hard to make any guarantees about quality or provenance. It’s hard to find guarantees no matter what, but the best bets always rely on some degree of trust.

Straight from the Farm

If you’ve read chapter 1, you know the care and work that goes into raising high-quality beef cows. One way to guarantee your beef is the best it can be is to get it directly from the source, that is, the rancher who raised the cow. This could be someone in your area from whom you can buy locally at the farmers’ market or even at his or her own farmstead, or this could be done from across the country thanks to the miracle of interstate shipping.

Despite the dominance of national grocers like Whole Foods, Costco, and Kroger, buying locally from the person who actually raised the animals is increasingly easy, as many farmers and ranchers have developed casual direct-to-consumer programs and achieved loyal followings. Every state has ample opportunities to buy meat this way. And it’s fun to shop locally, too. If you’re on a road trip, buying a steak is a pleasant way to start a conversation with a native and sample the local beef terroir. It’s hard to resist getting a piece of grass-fed beef when driving through the lush, emerald valleys of Vermont, The Green Mountain State. That’s equally true if you’re cruising through Central Texas and see groups of mighty longhorns glaring at you from a pasture or if you are traveling past a wildflower-strewn meadow in Wisconsin where plump cattle are grazing.

Of course, local beef isn’t always a hit. When you’re a tourist, you never really know what you’re going to get. For instance, Jordan actually was that tourist, and after seeing all those lush Vermont pastures, he just had to find some delicious local grass-fed steaks. Unfortunately, what he located was an example of “bad” grass-fed beef, meaning that it was lean, tough, and tasted more like liver than loin. It spoke of a farmer who probably raised cattle primarily for dairy and not meat and didn’t really know how to or care to finish his beef properly. Disappointing!

But when you find a tried-and-true local producer of good quality, there’s almost nothing better. If you’ve got freezer space, you can buy a quarter of a cow (about one hundred pounds) or more at one time, saving money on a per-pound basis while making the life of the farmer easier. Many folks go in on such a deal as a group, sharing an entire animal. Of course, you’re going to get more than just steaks if you go this route. But even though this is a steak book, we highly encourage you to learn what to do with all the rest of the animal!

But given that steaks are a luxury item, the idea of buying the best you can find from a producer in another state and spending a bit on shipping isn’t so far-fetched. After all, without a second thought, we purchase everything from Nerf Official N-Strike Elite Strongarm Blasters to high-waist yoga pants (both recent best sellers on Amazon) through the mail these days. Why not meat? In fact, there’s a long tradition of sending frozen meat by mail, just as there is boxes of grapefruits or pears. Omaha Steaks started shipping to front doors in 1952.

One concern with mail-order meat, besides the sometimes extravagant cost of shipping, is the environmental costs of packaging materials, which even in our more eco-conscious age are still often Styrofoam and gel packs. Some outfits are counteracting this standard, however, like Alderspring Ranch of Idaho, whose packaging is recyclable and also returnable. Alderspring includes a prepaid return label in every shipment and offers a five-dollar rebate on your next order if you send the box back.

Beyond that generous and responsible recycling program (and the fact that the company eats the estimated ten-dollar cost of returns), Alderspring is a prime example of what you can get by ordering directly from a farm. If you’re interested in grass-fed beef of the highest quality, this is the place. Alderspring is a family-run ranch located in remote May, Idaho, in the Pahsimeroi Valley. They have about eight hundred acres of grassland in the valley, but more important, in the summer, they saddle up their horses and take the cattle into the mountains the old-fashioned way, leaving them on seventy square miles of mountain meadow and pasture. “We basically follow the snow line up the mountain,” says founder Glenn Elzinga. In the summer, the cattle eat a rich and diverse diet based on hundreds of native plant species growing on untouched, virgin soils. During this time, the cattle walk around and get to choose what they want to munch on. The beef is dry aged for tenderization for a couple of weeks and is then shipped out.

It’s American Angus beef like no other, and you can get it delivered to your door—one of the amazing aspects of being alive today.

Butchers and Curators

The very best butchers are just a half step further from the source. Old-fashioned whole-animal butchery is being revived as a craft and a business, a stark contrast from industrial butchers who get their beef parts in boxes and are merely responsible for separating them into steaks (if even that). In contrast, the new crop of throwback butchers buy entire carcasses and use their ingenuity and the superior sharpness of their knives not only to create great steaks but also all manner of other beef products, too.

In the case of a superior butchery like Austin’s Salt & Time (see this page), a lot of the steaks (and other meats) come directly from single farms and ranches. The butchers have visited these producers, or at least had long, probing conversations, and are fluent in the nature of the beef, the breed, and the conditions in which the cattle are raised.

SOME OF OUR FAVORITE REGIONAL PURVEYORS

In the next chapter, we talk with Ben Runkle and Bryan Butler, our friends and the owner-operators of Salt & Time in Austin, Texas. But if you’re not lucky enough to live in Austin, fear not; there are great artisanal butcher shops and meat purveyors across the country. Some ship by mail and some you’ve just got to be there for. Here are a few of our favorites.

Olivier’s, San Francisco, California

All butchers have their own unique approaches and specialties. Olivier Cordier is a passionate and voluble Frenchman who offers high-quality beef sold in the classic French cuts: côte de boeuf, entrecôte, faux-filet, onglet, and more. He dry ages his beef in the American style, sometimes for very long periods of time, inviting customers to reserve cuts of 60-, 120-, and 200-day dry-aged beef months in advance. When it comes to sourcing, however, Olivier won’t divulge where his beef comes from. In the Bay Area, where diners cynically joke about how restaurant menus tout the farms on which each morsel of food was grown, such a response is at first a bit shocking. But in such a competitive marketplace, Olivier figures if he literally gives away the farm, someone will try to horn in on his source or that source will cut him out, using his patronage as a stepping-stone to becoming a stand-alone brand. In this case, you just have to trust him…an easy thing to do after you cook up one of his steaks.

Flannery Beef, San Rafael, California

In a large space whirring with refrigeration and perpetual fans, in an anonymous industrial park, operates a butchery that has become internationally renowned for the quality of its beef. Bryan Flannery used to run a retail butcher shop but gave it up as his mail-order business took off. The spread of Flannery’s fame predates social media and has largely been due to word of mouth. His steaks have been buoyed by landing on the tables of some truly influential diners. For years, one of Flannery’s most high-profile clients has been Robert Parker, the world’s most prominent wine critic. In his newsletter, Parker often chronicles his always epic meals, occasionally writing things like, “The 55-day dry-aged Private Reserve Sirloin Strips from Bryan Flannery were, as usual, unreal. If this guy is not the best and most consistent purveyor of high-quality American beef, I would be
interested in knowing who is.”

Like Olivier Cordier, Flannery doesn’t detail the sources of his beef, just listing California, Midwestern, and Montana (for Wagyu). The point is that Flannery Beef is the trusted source, and to that end, all of the meat they buy is chosen and regraded by Bryan and his daughter, Katie, his business partner and successor. “We buy Prime beef,” says Katie, “but it happens all the time that we get meat delivered [on which] we have to downgrade the rating. Our standards are more exacting.” The Flannerys also age their beef, usually a minimum of thirty days, but work with individual customers and will age to specified lengths of time.

Crowd Cow, Seattle, Washington

Joe Heitzeberg and his cofounder, Ethan Lowry, came at their business thinking like consumers. A lifelong steak lover, Joe notes how steak has been regarded—and still is—as a commodity; you never know where it’s from or who raised it. But, he points out, coffee and chocolate were like that too, yet those products have become decommoditized. Today, you can buy single-origin, fair-trade, farm-specific versions of both from a dizzying number of global places. Joe and Ethan wondered why steak, such a special food, couldn’t be seen in the same light. At some point, a friend happened to mention to Joe that he was buying mind-blowing beef directly from a farm. The purchasing required a fair bit of coordination (arranging multiple people to contribute toward the cost of shares in a whole cow) as well as freezer space for maybe a hundred or more pounds of beef.

So, in the digital spirit of the times, Ethan and Joe hit on the idea of crowdfunding a cow—same way that random people might crowdfund a project on Kickstarter—allowing a larger number of people to buy a smaller amount of superior beef. In short order, after visiting some ranches and constructing a website, Crowd Cow launched, selling its first cow out in a day. The spirit of Crowd Cow is now as much about exploring the rancher and the ranch as it is about just selling delicious beef; Joe and Ethan want to show that in beef, as in wine and chocolate, there is terroir. The two founders have even put out a book, Craft Beef: A Revolution in Small Farms and Big Flavors, chronicling their philosophy and tales of beef sourcing.

BATEAU

1040 East Union Street
Seattle, Washington
tel: (206) 900-8699 • restaurantbateau.com

One can have no greater respect for a restaurant than one that reveres the cow so much that it commits to a program of raising its own beef, as well as butchering, aging, cooking, and serving it. Very, very few restaurateurs are willing to take on such a labor- and capital-intensive operation. When they do (such as at Spain’s El Capricho, see this page), their restaurants deserve our attention and support.

This is not difficult to offer Seattle restaurant maven Renee Erickson, whose other triumphs include the Walrus and the Carpenter, an oyster bar. The concept is simple: Erickson, along with chef Taylor Thornhill and talented butcher Tom Coss, brings in whole beef carcasses (some of which they’ve raised themselves, some of which are raised by trusted small ranchers) and turns them into dry-aged goodness. On a big chalkboard in the dining room, the dozens of steaks are listed first by ranch and length of aging and then by particular cut. Coss is resourceful with the animals, producing many obscure cuts, such as Jacob’s Ladder, Merlan, Oyster, Ball Tip, and more—as well as the old standbys. Each carcass offers only a limited number of cuts, and each cut is listed by weight and price. When one is purchased, a staff member takes a long pool cue–like pole with a piece of white chalk at the end and crosses it off, so everyone gets a fair shot at what’s remaining. All of the steaks are grass fed and grass finished.

The room is casual but elegant. Cooked in cast-iron pans and butter basted, steaks are given a long rest, after which they are picked up in a hot pan and reflashed for service. They are served with a choice of three different, pungent compound butters: bone marrow, preserved lemon and brown butter, and anchovy.

A hallmark of Erickson’s restaurants is her exquisite taste in everything from interior design to cocktails, and this is on full display at Bateau. The wine list is moderate in length but well chosen, and the seasonal sides are pitch-perfect, with gorgeous green salads, vibrant tomatoes, and foraged-mushroom fricassees. You may think salmon when visiting Seattle, but don’t sleep on the steak.

Indeed, the sourcing side of the job has become the most compelling part of it: Joe and Ethan have become steak hunters, that is, they now travel around the country and the world in search of the tastiest, most ethically raised, distinctive beef. On their site you can purchase shares of cows (as much or as little as you want, and when the order fills up, the cow “tips” and the meat will be harvested and sent out) from everywhere from Washington State to California, Montana, Missouri, and Pennsylvania.

Crowd Cow has even broken open Japan, where, among its several super-marbled triumphs, it has found the ultimate cult beef: olive-fed Kuroge Washu-breed Wagyu from a tiny corner of the country, the only place in the region where imported olive trees were planted. The beef is extraordinary. Joe shared one of the first samples with us, which we and a few of our steak-obsessed friends cooked up in Jordan’s mom’s backyard in Austin, along with a bunch of different steaks from other producers. With an oleic acid content of 65 percent (for reference, olive oil itself tends to run 55 to 83 percent) and bursting with juice, the steak’s featherlight fat belied its richness. It simply melted in the mouth, leaving a light, nutty flavor and disappearing with a resonant smack of umami.

Marketed Meat: The Truths and Myths of Branded Beef

Branding cattle with a hot iron is (rightly) seen as cruel these days and is hardly practiced. But what’s called “branded beef,” well, that’s one of the biggest trends in the world of beef in the last twenty years. Simply put, it’s just beef with a name, be it Creekstone or Niman Ranch. That name could stand for something like a real place or stringent standards, or it could be totally made-up and functionally meaningless. The simple act of putting a brand name on meat is a form of marketing. It suggests to the buyer that this beef stands for something, implying some aspect of quality that, if the brand is purchased again, will remain consistent. That suggested quality might be tenderness (Tyson’s Tender Promise) or environmental and animal welfare (Publix’s GreenWise).

In many cases, the brand does stand for something, as every branded beef program proclaims its own standards, based on things like locality, aging, genetics, and grade. To become certified in the United States, the program must be accepted and monitored by the USDA, which verifies that the claims of the brand are backed in every carcass. Not all brands are USDA certified, meaning that those that are not are held only by their own standards. American Branded Beef programs tend to fall into three major categories: breed specific, place specific, and company specific.

BREED SPECIFIC

Breed-specific programs focus on one particular breed. Most famous of them all, Certified Angus Beef (CAB for short, founded in 1978) promises that all of its meat comes from Angus cattle. There’s also a Certified Hereford Beef program for that breed and even a Certified Texas Longhorn Beef program. HeartBrand sells Akaushi cattle, a subset of Japanese Wagyu. In each of these cases, the genetics of the cattle used in the program are maintained and considered central to the quality of the beef.

Today, many, many brands peddle the ever-popular Angus breed, including Niman Ranch and Creekstone. In addition to the guarantee of breed, some of these brands support further standards, such as vegetarian diet, no hormones or antibiotics, and humane treatment. With the certification in 1978 of CAB, the general thought about branded programs would be that they were based on breed. But a decade later, the USDA began approving brands based on qualities other than breed.

PLACE SPECIFIC

Other brands are based on place, often launched by a coalition of like-minded ranchers to leverage teamwork and size to compete better in a brutal market. Oregon Country Beef is a good example. This brand doesn’t claim to be USDA certified, but it is non-GMO verified and GAP certified (a nonprofit that promotes animal welfare) by third parties.

While we don’t have designation of origin—another type of brand, in its own way—for beef in the United States, other countries do. The most famous in the beef origin world is arguably Kobe beef, a special kind of beef from Wagyu cattle that can only come from the Kobe region of Japan. Over the years, misuse of the name Kobe beef has been a constant problem for those protecting the brand. Merchants in the United States have repeatedly sold beef as Kobe that wasn’t from the region or even from Japan. (If you’re offered Kobe beef at a restaurant, be skeptical, exceedingly little real Kobe beef comes into this country, and it is tightly controlled.) Other famous beef designations of origin lie in the European Union, such as Spain’s Carne de Ávila, France’s Boeuf charolais du Bourbonnais, and the United Kingdom’s Scotch beef.

COMPANY SPECIFIC

New categories of branded beef were based on a single company. For instance, Cargill, one of the country’s big four beef companies, introduced its Sterling Silver program, becoming the second USDA-approved brand after CAB. Cargill differentiates its Sterling Silver beef not by breed but by a promise of marbling and maturity.

Then, of course, there are the grocery store brands—those weird labels you find in big grocery store chains that vaguely sound like something significant but that you’ve never seen anywhere else. They try to stand out against generic beef, though they may not be much better. A good example would be Safeway’s Rancher’s Reserve, which began in 2001 and was Select grade beef supplied by Cargill. The claim of Rancher’s Reserve was tenderness because, as a Safeway executive explained in a 2006 article in Beef magazine, “Every focus group we conducted indicated the most important aspect of beef-eating satisfaction was tenderness.”

MIYACHIKU

1401-255 Shinbeppucho Maehama
Miyazaki 880-0834, Miyazaki Prefecture, Japan
tel: (+81) 985-28-2914 • rest.miyachiku.jp/miyachiku

In the United States, the most famous high-end beef from Japan may be Kobe, but in Japan the beef that has been winning awards and that many consider the country’s most decadent is from the region of Miyazaki, located on the southeastern coast of the southern island of Kyushu. While this area is flush with water from rivers and an abundant coastline, it’s the nearby mountains where the black Wagyu cattle are bred that are of importance to us. These grain-fed animals produce some of the most marbled, tender, and tasty meat in the world.

Several restaurants in Miyazaki serve this beef, but none does so with the care and integrity of Miyachiku. The style here is teppanyaki, meaning the beef is cooked on a flattop. This is where Benihana’s shtick came from, but in Miyachiku and the other area restaurants, you simply sit at a counter built around the cooktop while the chef cooks small cubes of this expensive, rarefied beef in front of you. The meat is served in only small portions because any more would be almost indecently filling. And to the side, in fat rendered from the steak, the chef cooks vegetables and mushrooms, which are also served in small bites. Every now and then, the chef pours a few drops of alcohol onto the meat and sets it aflame to get a seared crust.

All in all, it’s a far cry from the lusty, carnal American steak experience. But in its precision, restraint, and pinpointed pleasure, it’s very Japanese. When you have those small bites and the steak literally melts in your mouth, almost disappearing into a wisp of profoundly beefy essence, you understand why they do it this way.

BAD BEEF AND BEEF SAFETY

Everyone should know bad beef when they see it…or rather smell it. If you’re wondering whether to cook a piece of meat on the edge, go with your, er, gut. But we’ll lay it out for you, as bad beef is both unpleasant and potentially unsafe. Most beef spoilage comes via bacteria introduced at processing, as the meat of a living animal is typically microbe-free. But once the animal is killed, bacteria from the hide or processing facility can get in there. Indicators the meat has spoiled are a slimy surface and the aroma of rotten eggs, which occurs because the bacteria is breaking down protein molecules and releasing sulfur compounds. Also, the surface tension of the meat will have disappeared; rather than be resilient to the touch, it will feel flaccid and dead. “Most of these [bacteria] are harmless but unpleasant,” notes Harold McGee, but it’s best to avoid the experience.

If you’ve got beef in a Cryovac bag, it’s undergoing what is called “wet aging” (see this page). The amount of time meat is wet aged is much shorter than for dry aging, as the moist environment (even in a really cold refrigerator) is a happy one for bacteria. Wet aging should not go on for more than three weeks. Whatever the beef gains in tenderization will be finished by then, and there are no flavor gains to be had. Indeed, the beef will start to deteriorate. In working on this book, we tasted some Cryovac-aged meat that had been bagged for somewhere between thirty-five and forty-two days. It didn’t make us sick or anything, but its texture lost some integrity, and the flavor had a touch of funk that was nothing like the delicious taste of dry-aged beef. For safety and taste, don’t keep unfrozen meat in Cryovac bags for more than twenty-one days in the refrigerator.

The power of branding allowed Rancher’s Reserve to fetch a higher price than normal Select-grade commodity beef. And it worked splendidly. In only a few years, Rancher’s Reserve was moving a similar amount of tonnage as the vaunted Certified Angus Beef. However, the tenderness standard for Select beef was difficult to maintain, both accurately and consistently. The only reliable test of tenderness, Safeway meat scientists found, took forty minutes to process, making it unrealistic, so they came up with their own rating system that presumably worked faster but was less reliable. The brand was retired in 2015, as Safeway recast its image with upgraded meats and produce overall. Safeway simply started selling USDA Choice-graded meat, a higher-level product.

Branded beef is something to be aware of, and USDA-certified brands actually involve a third-party guarantee (in this case, the government) that you’re getting something that lives up to certain standards beyond the USDA grades. You can look them up on the USDA website to learn what criteria are being imposed. However, plenty of brands—notably grocery store versions—are little more than names attached to beef to make it seem more specific or significant than it is.

Grade School

The grading of beef can seem both incredibly simple and contentiously complex, and your relationship to it depends on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go.

If you want to remain on the surface, there are only three USDA quality grades you’ll ever confront: Prime, Choice, and Select. Categories below Select exist, but you won’t deal with them for steaks.

Grading is done by the US Department of Agriculture, a service paid for by the meat packer or producer; companies can opt to sell their beef ungraded. (That’s not the same as uninspected. The USDA inspects facilities as part of its taxpayer-funded mandate.) Many slaughterhouses—especially the biggest ones—employ full-time USDA agents who grade every carcass as it passes through.

Beef is graded to create an estimate of the satisfaction consumers can expect from a piece of meat. This is done visually by the evaluation of marbling, the amount and distribution of intramuscular fat (see this page for more on that) between the twelfth and thirteenth ribs. From that glimpse at a tiny part of the cow, a grade is given to the entire carcass.

In the simple worldview, Prime is the best, accounting for about 5 percent of all graded beef, according to the USDA, which describes Prime beef as having “slightly abundant to abundant marbling and is generally sold in hotels and restaurants.”

Second best and accounting for around 70 percent of all graded beef, Choice is “high quality, but has less marbling than Prime.” Both grades are “well-suited for broiling, roasting, or grilling.”

Third best is Select, noted by the USDA as “normally leaner than Prime or Choice. It is fairly tender, but because it has less marbling, it may not have as much juiciness or flavor. Select beef can be great on the grill, and is also good for marinating and braising.” Select is about 20 percent of graded beef, with the balance falling into five lower categories that sound more like punishments than anything you’d want to cook: Standard, Commercial, Utility, Cutter, and Canner.

(The truth about Select is that grocery chains often create their private brands of beef in order to avoid customers having to see “Select” on a label. Generally, if any beef grades high enough to earn a Prime or Choice grade, it will be marketed under that designation.)

There you have it. That’s the simple version. But you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to reckon it might be too simple. And indeed it is.

Prime Suspect

As the USDA wrote in the just-noted definition, Prime beef is unusual enough that it generally goes straight to high-end hotels and restaurants. It’s true that it’s still pretty hard to find Prime-rated beef at your average grocery store, hence the rise and cachet of the steak house: the meat you could get there used to be substantially better than what you could cook at home and worth going out for. But you’ll notice we’re using the past tense there. In the age of the gourmet grocery store, top-level beef gets disseminated much more evenly. Furthermore, the mail-order business has grown hugely in the last twenty years. (Today, the best way for steak houses to add value is by dry aging, which is covered in chapter 4.)

But how do we know Prime-rated beef is all it’s cracked up to be? The short answer is we don’t. That shouldn’t be all that surprising, now that we know grading is done by the eye test of a fallible human.

“In my father’s day,” says butcher Bryan Flannery, “probably 20 percent of the cattle raised was classified as Prime. That was in the full-blown corn phase.” (Here, Bryan is referring to the then common practice of feeding cattle corn diets that made them fat, which is still the primary diet today. But in the 1960s and 1970s, he says, the cattle came from many fewer places and were in general much more consistent.) “But about ten years ago it was down to about 2 percent.” That’s a precipitous drop, fueled by a number of factors. First, market demand was down. Fat was the enemy in the 1980s and 1990s, and the country wasn’t calling for well-marbled meat. (This also marks the ascent of chicken in the American diet, which has taken a huge swath of market share from beef in the last thirty years.) To combat this fear of fat, in 1987, and for the third time since creating grading, the USDA lowered the marbling standard for Prime, eating into the category that was once Choice. It also changed the name of the third-tier category from Good to the suave-sounding Select. (We think there should be a grade called “Meh.”)

While industry conventional wisdom has Prime grading up in recent years to 3.5 percent or even higher, Flannery is suspect of those numbers. “I think that right now, in my experience, it’s probably down to 1 percent. We order Prime-rated beef all the time and end up downgrading it
because it doesn’t meet our standards of Prime. Probably 15 percent of what we buy as Prime we don’t sell as such. And we can’t return that. We take the loss. If the government slaps Prime on a piece of beef, there’s no recourse.”

So, if the reported supply of Prime-graded beef has almost doubled in the last twenty years, but someone like Bryan Flannery, who orders only Prime beef, attests it’s lower than he can remember, what gives? It seems the Prime grade has slid down the sliding scale. “A lot of meat graded today as Prime wouldn’t have qualified in the past,” Flannery says. “And I understand. If the inspector is looking at one thousand head and has in his mind that twenty to thirty of them need to be Prime rated to fall into the accepted percentage, he’s going to grade them Prime, even if they might only barely qualify or not qualify on traditional standards.”

If you can’t trust the grading system, how can you know whether or not your meat is up to par? The easiest way, of course, is to find a trusted source, like Flannery, who you know can vouch for the quality of his or her product. But what if it is not just the grading system and the Prime conspiracy that are the problem? What if it’s the criteria by which we’ve been taught to grade beef that’s actually bunk? As you’ll discover when you’re reading this book, there are lots of things we like to be contrarian about (tempering, resting…just wait, you’ll see). But perhaps the biggest and most controversial one is the question of marbling.

The Truth about Marbling

All this fuss over grading really comes down to marbling—to intramuscular fat. Not the big lips of fat that cling to the exterior of muscles and divide them from one another, but those little rivulets and wisps of white that disperse out into the lean red meat like veins in a leaf. That’s the marbling we can see. It also exists as microscopic little cells of juicy goodness that melt as the steak is cooked and explode in our mouths when we burst them with our teeth.

“Fat is flavor” is one of those memorable aphorisms for meat, much like “location, location, location” is to real estate. We’ve been told over and over that marbling is the key to everything. It causes the burst of juiciness we love in moist steak, and it carries—no, it embodies!—the deepest, most savory flavors. It is simply the essence of great steak. This is why Japanese Kobe beef, which shows more marbling than lean meat, is considered the world’s greatest steak delicacy. As Mark Schatzker writes in his book Steak, “Sensory evaluations have proven the supremacy of marbling time and again. American meat scientists believe in marbling the way American physicists believe in atoms and American biologists believe in cells.”

But is marbling truly the key to steak? Is fat flavor? There are reasons to doubt these assertions, reasons you don’t need scientists to prove. Well, do as Schatzker suggests: take a big bite of fat. Does it taste like beefy delicious steak? No, it doesn’t taste like much of anything. Now, the external fat does have a different composition than the intramuscular fat, but not that different. Even when you do have a big, juicy bite of liquefied marbling, say in a bite of real Japanese highly marbled Wagyu, the sensation you get from the liquid is not that of overpowering beef essence. (If you want to get scientific about it, it’s the flavor of soft, slightly nutty oleic acid.) Jordan has tasted what he (and many others) consider the beefiest-tasting steaks in the world, the ones from eight- to twelve-year-old oxen in Spain that have been grass fed and have been active their whole lives. The meat is not at all what we’d consider “heavily marbled,” yet there’s no denying its beefy flavor.

We’re sorry, but we’ve all had Prime and Choice steaks that have very little flavor, despite an abundance of juicy, unctuous fat. Perhaps the cow was fattened up exceptionally fast; plied with hormones, antibiotics, and beta-agonists; and then harvested at twelve months of age. It may have fat, but it simply won’t have as much flavor as an animal that was on pasture for most of its life, lived drug-free, and was harvested at twenty to thirty months.

None of this empirical evidence seems to support the idea that fat is flavor. More likely, it seems reasonable to assume that flavor comes from both muscle and fat. The genetics of the cow, what the cow ate, and how it lived all matter. We know that grass and a diverse forage show up as flavor in both the milk and the meat of a cow. Animals that move more in their lifetime develop not only more toughness in their muscles but also more flavor. Age contributes to flavor, too: the longer the cow lives, the more phytonutrients and beta-carotenes and other compounds get stored away in the muscles and the fats. And finally, how the animal was treated affects the flavor. Cattle that are stressed or fearful tend to have off flavors. If you really want steak with great flavor, you have to seek out meat of character—not just graded Prime.

Other Steak Labels and What They Mean

Producers love to plaster their meats with labels and certifications. From various labels, you can learn whether the steaks came from animals that were raised on open grassland, fed organic food, raised free of chemical additives, and treated humanely—allegedly. Of course, as with many food terms these days, these labels often mean less than you might think. Here’s a brief guide to them.

GRASS FED

It may be the most meaningful movement happening in the steak world these days, but when it comes to the label, “grass-fed beef” doesn’t have a lot of meaning. In 2016, the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service dropped any official definitions of the term grass fed from its regulations. The USDA website still defines the grass-fed standard as requiring “ruminant animals be fed only grass and forage, with the exception of milk consumed prior to weaning…cannot be fed grain or grain by-products and must have continuous access to pasture during the growing season.” However, this term is not rigorously enforced or inspected. That is, producers who want to label their product as officially grass fed and earn the “USDA Process Verified” tag have only to submit $108 and documentation stating their animals are fed solely on grass and they’ll receive the label. No inspection is required.

BERN’S STEAK HOUSE

1208 South Howard Avenue
Tampa, Florida
tel: (813) 251-2421 • bernssteakhouse.com

Of all the old-school steak houses in America, Bern’s, improbably located in Tampa, Florida, is king. Founded in 1956, it offers the decadent clubbiness of the classic steak house but with a baroque eccentricity that distinguishes it from the far-too-common soulless, corporate steak temple. For instance, the restaurant is a vast, multichambered, warren-like space, with each of its windowless dining rooms uniquely appointed with one-of-a-kind decorations that range from oil paintings to classical busts to images of European vineyards.

Although the décor may be quite theatrical, the food is highly serious, with a DIY spirit that reaches into every corner of the kitchen. Bern’s not only operates a farm that grows some of the produce on offer but also roasts its own coffee, cellars its own cheese, buys its spices whole and grinds them, and, yes, ages and cuts to order every steak.

All of the steak served is Prime and aged five to eight weeks. Ordering it can be a little daunting, however, as the specificity on the menu is reminiscent of a spreadsheet. Filet mignon, Chateaubriand, strip sirloin, Delmonico (ribeye), porterhouse, and T-bone are all offered in at least four options based on width and weight that correspond to recommendations for number of people served and proper doneness. You can even choose from eight different degrees of doneness, such as very rare (no crust), very rare (with crust), rare (cold center), and so on. It’s a complicated but loving and respectful testament to the supreme value of steak. Take some time to explore the steak section of the Bern’s website—it’s remarkable.

There’s much more to the menu and the quality of offerings at Bern’s than can be covered here, but we’d be remiss not to mention the wine program, which boasts the largest restaurant cellar in the world, harboring around seven hundred thousand bottles, and a remarkable two hundred wines offered by the glass. Because Bern’s long ago bought not by the case but by the pallet (fifty-six cases), huge supplies of high-quality wines dating back to the 1960s and 1970s remain, not to mention rarities from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Tampa may not be a destination for most people, but if you find yourself in Florida—or even in the southeastern United States—it’s worth a detour for a great steak dinner and a fine bottle of wine.

The upshot • Real grass-fed producers complain all the time that many ranchers simply cheat the system—they have the grass-fed label, yet don’t feed their animals only grass. Furthermore, there’s consternation that other producers don’t actually graze their animals, but instead confine them to a feedlot and give them concentrated grass pellets that contain none of the wholesomeness or diversity of true, well-managed pasture. Plus, this label focuses only on diet and doesn’t take into account whether or not the animals were fed hormones or antibiotics or how they were treated. In essence, the USDA’s grass-fed label is toothless.

Fortunately, much more rigorous and serious third-party grass-fed certifiers exist who actually do annual audits of producers. The gold standard among them is the American Grassfed Association. If you see the circular, green “American Grassfed” logo on a product, the cows were fed only forage, were raised on pasture and not in confinement, and were never treated with hormones or antibiotics. Another organization is the Oregon-based A Greener World, whose “Certified Grassfed by AGW” label also requires documentation and annual audits of both farms and plants (if applicable) and goes as far as requiring forage testing for the nutrition of the feed.

ORGANIC

The organic seal from the USDA is quite thorough. For meat, it requires that the animals were raised on certified organic land—meaning it’s been free of most synthetic fertilizers and pesticides for at least three years—have year-round access to pasture (although they don’t necessarily have to be grass fed), were fed 100 percent organic feed and forage (which can include grain), and were not administered antibiotics or hormones. This is regulated by documentation and an annual audit from a USDA inspector.

The upshot • Although this says nothing about grass fed, and the list of allowed organic and synthetic substances within the organic designation is incredibly long and full of all sorts of chemicals, this is the most highly regulated and demanding of the USDA labels.

PASTURE RAISED

The USDA doesn’t conduct third-party “Pasture Raised” certification, but it does have to approve any product that bears this label. In this case, pasture raised, or variants like “pasture grown” or “meadow raised,” refers only to the living conditions of the animals and not to what they were fed. The USDA requires meats bearing these labels to come from animals that had a minimum of 120 days a year of continuous free access to the outdoors. This is “desk regulated,” meaning that these labels only require the submission of documentation.

The upshot • Given that the labels only require access to “the outdoors” (whatever that exactly means) for only about four months of the year and that the access is not physically verified by a compliance agent, these labels can be considered essentially meaningless. Any farmer serious enough about pasturing his or her animals and wanting to communicate that to the general public would seek more stringent certification than what the USDA provides.

HOW TO CHOOSE A STEAK IN THE STORE

The meat case of a good grocery store can be a tempting place or a minefield. A good way to increase your chances of having a decent steak for dinner is choosing the right piece of meat. Unfortunately, the clerks behind the counters are less likely to be able to offer good guidance as they may once have been. Grocery store beef these days is often cut at a central processing facility and delivered to the stores, meaning the counter people just lay it out without needing to know anything about the cuts. Here are a few tips to take out some of the guesswork.

• Take your time and really inspect the cuts on offer. Every piece of steak is different, so it pays to make sure each one is great. You wouldn’t buy an expensive pair of pants without first trying them on, would you?

• Choose the freshest steaks. All the meat in the supermarket looks red. This is because special packaging is used that allows the myoglobin in the meat to combine with oxygen to “bloom,” or turn a bright, attractive shade of red. (Incidentally, harder-working muscles like chuck or flank contain more myoglobin and will thus appear redder than rib and loin steaks.) However, if you detect brown or gray on the steaks, it means the iron in the myoglobin is oxidizing. That’s not necessarily a sign of spoilage, but rather just a steak that’s been sitting around longer.

• Go for thicker steaks. Even if the outside shows more oxidation, a thicker steak will have a greater proportion of fresh, unexposed meat.

• Prepackaged or under glass? Not always, but usually, grocers put their best meat in the case. The case generally holds a better selection of cuts as well.

• Do look for fat. The whole point of our marbling screed was that marbling is not the sole source of flavor in a steak, but it is a good indication of what will turn juicy and sweet. Exterior fat, while you don’t want to pay for too much of it, can help the steak cook more evenly and slowly.

• Avoid connective tissue. Look for steaks that have large, single muscles or muscle groups. When you can see several individual muscles in a piece of beef being offered as a steak, pass up the cut. The connective tissue separating the muscles will toughen during fast cooking, making large parts of the steak inedible.

• Avoid the fancy store-created brand names. This is how stores have learned to sell lower-grade meat. Go for well-marbled, upper Choice for the best quality-to-price ratio.

RAISED WITHOUT HORMONES OR ANTIBIOTICS

Products bearing this USDA certification can have no antibiotics or any added hormones—ever. The USDA certifies these labels by reviewing documentation sent in by the producer. No in-person audits are made.

The upshot • Concerns about giving cattle antibiotics, the widespread use of which is considered very likely to contribute to the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and create dangers of superbugs that can’t be controlled, or added hormones, whose negative effects on health have not been substantiated (though they’re banned in Europe), are legitimate. These labels are helpful, but, once again, enforcement is light, and it’s generally up to the producer to stand by the claims. The best way to ensure the absence of hormones and antibiotics in your beef is to buy organically certified meat or to research the producer yourself.

“PRODUCT OF THE USA”

In 2015, Congress repealed the Country of Origin Labeling law (COOL, for short) that required beef labels to state where the animal was born, raised, and slaughtered.

Industry groups who lobbied against COOL (and won) said that tracking, labeling, and verifying the movement of beef wasted a billion dollars a year for an industry that’s already tight. The anti-COOL forces also said that there’s no regulation against meat companies offering that information voluntarily, and customers can vote with their dollars by supporting the companies that do.

But now, without COOL, imported beef can misleadingly but legally bear a “Product of the USA” mark if it’s been processed in this country. So, a side of beef raised in Australia but processed and packed at a facility in Kansas can be called American beef, which is outrageous.

Luckily, the USDA seems to think it’s a serious enough question to revisit the issue. They were scheduled to open up the topic for debate starting in August 2018. We shall see what they decide.

In the meantime, be wary of beef that is being heavily promoted as a US product. As with someone who doth protest too much, it may not be from here at all. And there’s really no way to know.