1
Meet the Meat
One cow is approximately one Prius-full of meat.
This is the latest fact I've learned in the past twenty-four hours. It's also the most pressing, as the aforementioned cow has been frozen, packed into eight neat boxes, and stacked into the back of my jet-black Prius. I'm behind the wheel, hell-bent for leather, racing against the cold pouring off the boxes in palpable waves. Due south. Los Angeles by sundown.
"Ben, do we have another blanket we can toss on top of the cow?"
"Yep. On it."
Ben is my partner in a multitude of crimes. He's a spark plug of a man with forearms like footballs, thanks to his work as a film grip. If you're wondering what a film grip does, it's largely this: Grips solve problems. Ben's able to MacGyver his way out of nearly anything. He's also one of my oldest friends. If you need help with a project, but you don't know what you don't know-you need Ben.
Ben shifts in his seat and throws another blanket over the boxes in the back.
Outside the car, it's eighty-five degrees. Inside, it's about sixty. Regardless, I crank the air conditioner to MAX COLD. Foot on the gas.
* * *
Twenty-four hours earlier, Ben and I had headed in the opposite direction. Straight up the I-5, toward a small town about an hour and a half north of Sacramento. I needed to see a man about a cow.
The decision to buy this particular animal was the result of months of research. I had decided that I didn't know enough about where my food comes from and that I needed to address this ignorance head-on. Since, like many Americans, my go-to protein is beef, I started there.
As we zip north, we pass another of my potential beef supplier options: the largest beef facility on the West Coast. Harris Ranch, located along the I-5, is a textbook example of what most people think of when they consider beef production. Feedlots sprawling like agricultural suburbs-their soil a darker black than the soil outside due to the hooves and dung of countless cattle. They process up to a quarter-million cattle annually-handling every aspect from feeding to slaughter, packaging, and shipping.
Harris Ranch is a leading purveyor of corn-fed beef, the type to which most Americans are accustomed. If you've had a hamburger in a restaurant or bought beef at a supermarket and it wasn't otherwise labeled, it was fed on some mixture of corn and other grains. Beef fed on cheap corn can reach market weight in a little over a year. The result: lots of beef at low prices.
However, there are other costs. First, cattle aren't really built to eat corn-they're built to eat grass. The first of their four stomachs is called a rumen (hence, "ruminant"). It's like a gigantic beer keg in the animal's chest. The rumen holds beneficial bacteria that ferment the chewed grasses the cattle eat. These bacteria in turn become a major source of protein for the animal. That's how cattle are able to derive protein from a protein-free grass-they're eating the bacteria that feed on it.
When cattle eat corn, fermentation in the rumen stops. The rumen becomes more acidic in order to break down this suboptimal food. Effects are manifold: First, cattle stomachs become more like our stomachs. As a result, any potentially harmful bacteria in the rumen adapt to their new environment and become in turn more able to make humans sick. Bacteria like E. coli.
An acidic rumen can also give cattle something roughly analogous to bovine heartburn, called acidosis. This disease keeps them from eating, defeating the purpose of feeding them corn. As a result, heavy preventative doses of antibiotics are introduced to keep acidosis at bay. An estimated 80 percent of all antibiotics used in the United States are administered to livestock.
Remember the E. coli breeding in their rumen? The aforementioned antibiotics can make the bacteria antibiotic-resistant.
Further, corn-fed beef lose their source of protein as the beneficial grass-digesting bacteria in their rumen vanish, requiring their diet to be supplemented with other forms of protein. In industrial times, that protein has come from the ground-up carcasses of other animals, including other cattle. This bovine cannibalism turned out to be a spectacular way to spread mad cow disease (aka bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE)-which is transmitted by contact with infected brain or spinal tissue. Consumption of mad cow-tainted beef has been linked with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans-a degenerative and fatal brain disorder, symptoms of which include rapidly progressing dementia, loss of muscular coordination, personality changes, impaired vision, and a raft of other neurological impairments. Eating mad cow-tainted beef is a tremendously bad idea.
Because of fears over mad cow disease, in 1997 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) prohibited the use of ruminant protein in cattle feed. Now, cattle protein is frequently fed to poultry and poultry protein is fed back to cattle. It isn't cannibalism, but cattle eating chickens isn't exactly natural, either.
Corn-fed beef also requires, well, corn, which is one of the most energy-intensive crops produced. Gigantic petroleum-dependent combines plant the corn and harvest it, petroleum-derived pesticides and fertilizers ensure a prodigious crop, and petroleum-driven vehicles transport it to feedlots. Some sources estimate that a single corn-fed beef steer is the product of 284 gallons of petroleum over the course of his life.
When you hear people say that beef production is energy-intensive-this is why.
I don't fault beef producers such as Harris Ranch for trying to make a living. Like any agricultural pursuit, ranching is a wildly risky proposal. The debt to get started can be tremendous, the competition intense. Nobody-no matter how altruistic-wants to go bankrupt.
Industrial beef producers are responding to market forces, and in a minuscule way I am a part of that market. With my food dollars, however, I'd like to vote for a different process.
* * *
Ben and I pull into Chaffin Family Orchards, a working ranch and farm just outside Oroville, California, after nine hours of driving. Chris Kerston, the ranch's chief marketing guy, has agreed to show us around.
The ranch looks like many small-scale farms. Though the landscape is picturesque, the farm buildings themselves are weather-beaten and worn-the effort put into building this place has clearly gone into function over aesthetics. A small house sits by an enormous barn. Dirty pickups crowd a gravel driveway. A road leads up a grassy slope to parts unknown.
I walk toward the barn. A small lean-to in front houses their farm stand, offering nectarines, fresh eggs, chickens, olive oil, and a few other items. Notably, there is no one here. There is, however, a box with a slit in the top.
I point at the cash box. Despite the fact that we're alone, I whisper to Ben, "Dude, I think this place works on the honor system."
"That's awesome. I don't think you could do that in LA."
"Isn't that how we pay for the subway in LA?"
"Who pays for the subway in LA?"
"Touché."
The front door of the house opens and a tall, thin man walks out. I wave as I approach, as one only does in the country. "Morning.... Chris around?"
"I'll get him."
The thin man disappears back into the house. I shove my hands in my pockets and take in the view. Across the road, rows of fat, gnarled trees stretch all the way to the horizon. There is no sound but the wind.
The door to the house clangs open and Chris ambles out. He's probably thirtyish but looks younger in a red button-down shirt and jeans. He sports the dirty ball cap of a man who works outside, but he rocks a soul patch like he might have followed Phish once upon a time. At his age, that couldn't have been too long ago.
When he sees us, he grins like it's his default response to the world. "Hey, I'm Chris."
"Hey, man. Jared. This is Ben."
"Great to meet you guys. Ready to go for a ride?"
The three of us jump onto a carryall, and Chris shows us around the ranch, very little of which is dedicated to raising cattle. It turns out they don't raise cattle for their own sake; they do it to produce better fruit.
Chaffin Family Orchards started about a hundred years ago when its founder, Del Chaffin, bought the land from UC Berkeley, which had an agricultural research station there. The research station grew olive trees, and those trees still stand-I spotted them from the barn.
Olive trees have needs. They need fertilizer and pruning. The area between them must be kept mown, otherwise grass and shrubbery will grow and choke out the trees. And once every three months, the trees like to be petted and told that they're pretty. Because they are.
Most commercial farms handle these needs through chemical or mechanical means. They plant gigantic fields with a single crop-say, peaches. They spray their crop with chemical fertilizers to help the plants grow and hire a guy to mow between the trees to keep out competing plants. The result? A broad expanse of bare dirt growing exactly one species of plant. That's called a monoculture. (And monocultures are never told they're pretty.)
Because from an ecological perspective, monocultures aren't especially efficient. The system to create them requires huge energy inputs from the grower: for the tractor, the guy who drives the tractor, the fuel for the tractor, and the fertilizer for the trees. It isn't just an environmental burden on the grower-it's an economic burden.
Chaffin Family Orchards does things differently. Rather than hire a guy to mow between the trees, they send in goats. One of the main threats to orchard trees is shrubbery. The goats roam through the field and clear out any shrubbery that would otherwise choke out the trees. They also climb through the lower branches-yes, they're tree-climbing goats-and keep the lower six feet of branches pruned of green shoots, which would, if they were allowed to bloom, decrease the yield of the tree. Further, the goats fertilize the soil, eliminating much of the need for chemical fertilizer.
"But," you may ask, "what about predators?" As was the custom long ago, the shepherds at Chaffin raise and socialize livestock guardian dogs that live with the herd and protect them from coyotes and whatever else might go bump in the night.
As a result, rather than paying for a tractor, fuel, and extra manpower, the farmers produce an additional crop-chevon, or goat meat. This is in addition to the services the goats provide trimming the trees and fertilizing the soil.
After the goats, the ranchers send a herd of cattle through the orchard to mow down the grass that the goats leave behind. These cattle further fertilize the orchard while providing another crop: grass-fed beef.
The steer that I will be taking home once grazed here. Chris takes us to see the current herd-a group of about thirty, reddish-brown, eleven-hundred-pound steers cavorting through century-old olive trees. I try to get closer, but they aren't having it. They canter off into the distance, weaving behind trees to get away from me. They're remarkably graceful. Like bovine ninjas.
The cattle will live on this land for most of their life. After sixteen months or so, they'll be moved to an adjacent pasture for finishing-eating their fill of bright green clover and grass until they come up to harvest weight. At that point, they'll be taken one at a time to a local processor, quickly stunned into unconsciousness with a bolt stunner, and then slaughtered. The processor-colloquially known as a "butcher"-is an Animal Welfare Approved (AWA) local businessman. And per the AWA standards, the animal should have absolutely no awareness of the event. Afterward, the butcher partitions and flash-freezes the carcass according to Chris's instructions.
We leave the herd and wander farther afield to the mobile henhouses, newly arrived to this bit of acreage. After Chaffin sends the cattle through the orchard, they follow up a few days later with chickens. Chickens are omnivores, and they're at their best when they eat both grass and animal protein in the form of bugs-like the bugs that hatch from the cattle and goat manure. The chickens, in turn, lay eggs in the mobile henhouse that travels around the farm with them.
"We don't play Easter morning every day out here," says Chris.
Truly free-range eggs, another crop, and the chickens also further fertilize the trees.
This system of crop rotation means that Chaffin is able to produce each individual crop for less than it would cost if they tried to produce that crop in isolation.
From a beef-production perspective, this agricultural system has distinct advantages. Cattle raised on pasture evade most of the pitfalls of feedlot cattle-no acidosis, so far less need for antibiotics. No need for protein supplementation, so dramatically reduced risk of mad cow. The cattle eat the lawn, so no need to plant, grow, harvest, and ship corn.
For the most part, the steers aren't raised on dedicated, single-purpose pastures, so land use is more efficient as well. Rather than support one crop, each acre supports three or four.
Finally, and perhaps most important, the cattle are sold directly by the rancher-who keeps more of the sale price-and are sold at a premium, to boot. People will pay more for beef raised this way. I suppose I'm living proof.
We head back toward the barn, steering the carryall past our cars and up a winding road that crests a tall mesa behind the farm. This is Table Mountain, so named because it's a mountain that looks like a table. Funny, that.
Atop the mountain, Chris points the carryall at a small, rain-fed lake. A barbecue grill standing next to it is the tallest object for miles. In the west, the sun is just beginning to dip below the horizon.
"Damn. Great view. You guys grill up here a lot?"
Chris grins. "All the time. You guys should come back later in the summer."
"Might have to."
"You should get into farming, man. Don't do it for the money, 'cause there isn't any. But it sure is fun."
* * *
Los Angeles is nine hours from Oroville. The plan is to snag a hotel room for the night and head homeward first thing in the morning. Chris is keeping my steer in cold storage at the ranch overnight, so we'll pick it up from him right before we leave.
He suggested we crash at the Gold Country Hotel and Casino. I pull up, and Ben is immediately a fan.
"Dude! A bear that will eat your dreams."
I look to where he's pointing. Painted on the side of a building, twenty feet tall, is a grizzly bear charging through a dream catcher. The hotel logo, or a mascot, or something.
"Gold Country Hotel and Casino-Where Dreams Get Ravaged by Nocturnal Predators." Sometimes I speak in taglines. "You hungry?"
* * *
The top floor of the casino has a steakhouse that Chris raved about. Given the nature of our trip, steak is definitely the plan for the evening.
We walk in, doing our best not to look like we've been working on a farm all day. Management doesn't blink, and we score a Hollywood booth facing a massive window. After a beer and a lobster bisque, we survey our choices.
All their steaks are grain-fed, which is expected. Grain-fed steak has more intramuscular fat-in other words, marbling-than grass-fed, and offers the taste and texture to which Americans are accustomed.
The restaurant's steaks are also graded Prime by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). This grade is almost entirely determined by the degree of intramuscular fat, with Prime being the most desirable and the most marbled (i.e., fatty). Almost all the Prime in the United States goes to high-end restaurants-this intramuscular fat is why people generally find them so delicious. Fat is flavor. Below the Prime designation is Choice and Select, both of which you usually find in supermarkets. These are less fatty than their higher-end counterparts. The grades below Select are the stuff they feed to prisoners and college students.
The steaks at the restaurant are also dry-aged for thirty-one days, according to the menu. In dry aging, the beef is hung, uncovered, in a refrigerator for several weeks. This allows moisture to evaporate from the meat, concentrating its flavor, and also allows natural enzymes present within the beef partially to break down the muscle fibers, increasing tenderness. Dry aging is a very good thing.
In short, the Gold Country Hotel and Casino offers a textbook high-end steakhouse. It'll serve as an excellent control test for all my beef adventures to come.
With this comparison in mind, we decide on rib eyes. Medium rare, because we aren't Philistines. Show me a person who orders a steak cooked past medium, and I'll show you a person who doesn't actually like steak. And rib eye is the king of steaks. It's the steak that people who like steak like liking. Properly preparing a rib eye is frequently considered the pinnacle of the grilling arts.
Rib eye comes from the appropriately named rib primal. That primal sits on top of the animal and doesn't do a lot of work moving the animal around. As a result, it's quite tender and has a fair bit of marbling. The steaks arrive perfectly cooked. Nicely seared exterior, warm red center. Beautiful.
Here's the thing about grain-fed beef: It doesn't suck. The texture is very tender, made even more luscious by the abundant marbling. It tastes every bit like the indulgence that it is.
If this is a taste-no pun intended-of things to come, in the next year I am going to eat like a king.
* * *
After nine hours on the road back to Los Angeles, our beef-laden Prius wheels into the garage of my modest home in the suburbs. My wife, Summer, meets me at the door. She's tall and freckled just so, with fat rings of auburn hair that she can never quite tame. Right now, her face is trying to decide whether to display "wary" or "excited."
"Success?"
"You could say that."
Ben and I unload the car. Box after box, like it's a clown wagon full of cow flesh. My enormous Rhodesian Ridgeback, Basil (like the herb, not the Brit), sniffs each of them excitedly. She's a solid hundred pounds and the most food-motivated pooch I've ever seen. Even my toddler son knows to clutch his crackers to his chest and hit the deck when she starts sniffing around.
Ben and I drop the eight massive boxes on the patio in my backyard. I tear one open, revealing two dozen or so neat plastic packages, hard as rocks. Our ersatz meat wagon did the trick.
Summer surveys the haul. "So that's it?"
"That's it. Four hundred and twenty pounds of grass-fed beef. Dry-aged twenty-one days."
"And how much is this setting us back?"
"Twenty-five hundred bucks. Ish."
I see the wheels turning in her head. Doing the math. Mentally carrying the one. Finally, she responds. "Okay. Where did you put the key to the freezer?"
Our freezer is a 14.7-cubic-foot chest model we picked up at the hardware store with a gift certificate and all our Christmas money. It sits in one corner of our backyard. It's a beast. And it's been running for seventy-two hours in preparation for this moment.
"It's in the key drawer. With all the other keys," I reply.
Summer shakes her head. "I thought so, too. But it isn't there."
"What do you mean? It has to be."
"Try again."
I rush to the kitchen and throw open our aptly named key drawer. Keys of all shapes and sizes slosh forth in a brass wave. Door keys. Padlock keys. What I believe may be boat keys, for some reason. No freezer keys.
The freezer is locked and empty.
I rush back outside. My newly acquired cow is sitting in boxes in the Southern California sun. In June. In the afternoon. Quietly thawing.
"Shitty shit shit. Summer, Ben, can you guys help me throw some blankets back over these boxes? We have to find that key."
Everyone else is moving in slow motion. I zip to the car and grab the blankets. Back to the yard.
Somehow, the freezer is open.
Ben slips a flathead screwdriver back into his pocket. "I picked the lock."
Like I said, grips solve problems.
We tear open the boxes and begin to load the freezer. This project isn't theoretical anymore-it's as real as real gets. As I open case after case of premium beef, I am apprehensive.
This is way more beef than I expected.
* * *
It doesn't fit.
I reassess. It's supposed to fit. Eight boxes, twenty inches by thirteen inches by eight inches, into a 14.7-cubic-foot freezer, using base twelve calculations. I did the math. Math is logical and reasonable. Math is what makes this not nuts. If I have math, then I haven't just made an enormous mistake.
The butcher that Chris hired to disassemble my steer broke it out into two halves, each partitioned differently. One half has been carved to optimize the cuts most suited for grilling and barbecue-steaks, ribs, and the like. The other half makes the most of the roasts and other cuts that need plenty of cooking time to reach their full potential. Both halves of the steer have been divided into dozens of packages of between approximately one and four pounds-though one package, a massive standing rib roast, tips the scales at just over six. And all of these packages, neatly labeled and ready for long-term storage, desperately need a temperature-controlled sanctuary from the Southern California sun.
I try again. I stack beef cut after beef cut after beef cut into the iron monster that is my freezer, and I still have two of the eight boxes left to go.
I may have math. But reality has the upper hand.
This is one of those things you don't consider when you decide you're going to buy an ungodly amount of meat. On paper, it's all so simple. "Oh, I'll need a big freezer for that. I should go get one." There, done.
The reality is that big freezers are just that-big. They operate at enormous scales. And if my math is off, the waste will be similarly enormous. Say, for example, one was to purchase 420 pounds of beef and miscalculate the space required to store it by a mere 10 percent. (Because the packages are irregularly shaped and vary tremendously in size, it's an easy mistake to make.) That's forty-two pounds of beef that doesn't have a home. That's stressful.
I glance from my two spare boxes to my still-open freezer and back.
"It doesn't fit," my wife says.
"It has to fit."
"Does it know that?"
Ben frowns. "We can make it fit."
"We have to. Let's pull it." I suggest. Ben and I start unloading the 350 pounds of meat that did fit. "We need a plan."
Ten minutes later, an entire exploded cow surrounds us on my patio, each piece swathed in shrink-wrap. Is that moisture on the outside of a couple of the pieces? Can't be. Shut up, brain.
Ben thinks. "Big stuff at the bottom?"
"Maybe. But big stuff is irregularly shaped," I say.
Summer frowns. "Little stuff at the bottom doesn't really make sense."
I have a revelation. "Ground beef comes in little one-pound rectangles. Let's line the floor and sides with it."
"We have those weird hanging drawers in the side," Summer notes.
"Even better. We can stack all the ground beef at the bottom, and fill those drawers with all the small stuff, and pile all the big stuff in the center."
We spend the next fifteen minutes reloading about four hundred pounds of beef. This time, it looks like it's going to fit.
It almost does. "Fiddlesticks," I say, glancing down at my son, Declan, who has wandered outside to watch the beef drama unfold. The word in my head is not fiddlesticks-ordinarily I swear like a Tourette's-addled sailor. But as Declan has grown, the Kid Censor in my head has become well-oiled and Ferrari-smooth. At nearly two years old, Declan is just starting to learn the fun words.
"Honey, what's in the freezer inside the house?"
"It's full."
"Actually full? Or 'I need to set boundaries' full?"
"Both."
Ben squints. "We can make it fit."
I survey the remaining pieces. Maybe twenty pounds. "Okay. Beef Tetris."
Once again, we unload four-hundred-plus pounds of rock-hard, ice-cold, irregularly shaped beef bits back into their boxes. Quickly-as it's June, we're in Los Angeles, and I'm genuinely beginning to worry that I've just wasted Dec's college fund.
"Okay. First, all the ground along the sides. In the drawers. Everywhere. They're regularly shaped so we can pack everything in tight. No spaces, no air."
Ben nods. "Good plan." Which is like having James Bond tell you that you can hold your liquor and look good in a tux.
"All right, so ... big stuff in next. Pack it tight. Don't just toss it-shove it in there. Pack it so tight this guy could walk around and moo if he felt like it."
At this point, between our unloading, loading, reloading, unloading, and reloading again, we've moved about 1,300 pounds of beef. But this-this try is our most promising yet.
Summer smiles. "I think we have a winner."
It gets dicey toward the end. I have particular trouble with a bag of marrow bones (I have marrow bones?) that just won't cooperate. After a few more minutes of jockeying for space and a couple of particularly M. C. Escheresque maneuvers with a hanging tender-we are good. The lid closes. The freezer hums. A green light on the front glows serenely.
"All right. Who's hungry?"
* * *
"I have an entire cow in an iron box in my backyard. I can cook, literally, any piece of beef the world has ever known. What do I do?"
Summer laughs. "If you don't cook a steak, you're doing it wrong."
She has a point. Americans eat, on average, fifty-two pounds of beef per person per year, and about a quarter of the carcass, give or take, comprises the primal muscle groups we associate with steak. Further, apart from burgers, steaks are the most popular single beef dish eaten in restaurants. No matter how you slice it, Americans eat a lot of steaks.
I had a steak the night before, but anything else seems sacrilegious. The question becomes, then-which steak? T-bone, porterhouse, filet, strip, rib eye, hanging tender, top round, round, sirloin-all steaks. I'm overwhelmed with options.
Rib eye? Had it last night.
Porterhouse? Huge. Those things look like they're out of a cartoon.
T-bone? Maybe.
Filet? No. I have plans for those.
Sirloin? That's like, "default beef," right?
Round steak? Looks oblong to me.
Tenderized round steak? The same, but in touch with its feelings?
London broil? Sounds like a steak. But is, in fact, a five-pound roast.
Hanging tender? What the hell is that?
Crosscut shank? Looks steaky, from the size of the package. But again, a mystery.
Further, a new conundrum presents itself. I'm trying to make the best use of each cut of this animal that I possibly can. Familiar or not, I have only a limited number of each cut. I mess up the wrong dish-I may not get a second chance.
Summer and Ben are looking at me like I'm about to raise my arms and make some sort of grand proclamation about dinner. They're hungry. "KC strip," I decide, keeping my arms firmly at my sides. A lovely steak-and a familiar one.
The Kansas City strip steak comes from the short loin of the animal. It's far from the head and the hoof, which means that it doesn't do a whole lot of work moving the animal around. As a result, it doesn't develop a lot of connective tissue the way, say, a chuck steak would. It's best treated simply, grilled hot and fast, and served medium rare.
I open my freezer to pull it, sifting through all the packages I just managed to close the lid on. The strip steaks are nowhere to be seen.
They must be on the bottom.
For the fourth time that day, I begin to unload beef from my freezer. Not all the way-I just stack the packages on the edge of the freezer, excavating a hole into which I delve for steaky goodness. "Smart," I think. "Less work loading and unloading the entire haul." I pile the other cuts around the edge of the hole, spelunking into a man-made cavern of rock-hard, irregular bricks at subzero temperatures, searching for a single elusive gustatory prize. Finally, I find a single package of strip steak at the bottom of the hole. I reach for it.
Beefalanche. All the stacked-and, it turns out, slippery-cuts balanced around the edge of the hole tumble everywhere. I manage to grab the steak, but a five-pound London broil clatters to the concrete, barely missing my toe. Filets skitter across the pavement like hockey pucks. It's pandemonium.
However, I am victorious. I hold in my hand a slim, plastic-wrapped brick of beef. And with this package's absence, I have ever so slightly more room in the freezer than I did previously.
And I have a dinner to cook.
* * *
Safe in the kitchen, I thaw and rinse the steaks, pat them dry, then take a good look. They're not the Technicolor-bright red of grocery store steaks-they're a deeper crimson. This could be due to aging, or it could be because they're grass-fed. I don't know. And while they do have some marbling, they pointedly do not have the copious fat streaks of grain-fed beef. I'm told they cook faster as a result, so I'll have to keep an eye on them. I'd prefer to not wreck my very first meal from this enormous beef stockpile. Especially with guests.
I slather a little canola oil on my hands and rub it on the steaks. The fat will serve as a heat conductor and contribute to a quality sear. A liberal dose of salt and pepper and the steaks are prepped.
Each steak is about an inch and a half thick, which translates (roughly) to three minutes a side at 450 for medium rare. With some minor fanfare, I slap them on the grill.
Night's coming on. Somewhere, a cricket chirps. Ben and I are bone-tired, in the way that driving nine hours and juggling nearly a quarter ton of beef can make you. We're also hungry.
Timer says ninety seconds have elapsed. On a lark, I peek at the steaks.
Oh, they're ready. So very ready-seared beautifully and cooked nearly to half their thickness. Hurriedly, I flip them. They hit medium rare in half the time suggested for grain-fed. I'm very lucky I checked. My inability to spend a moment without a task barely kept us from eating shoe leather. It's a win for self-diagnosed borderline obsessive-compulsives everywhere. Another ninety seconds and the steaks are done.
I set them aside to rest, throw some broccoli in a pan to broil, and turn to find Declan watching me. This is the hardest part of my day: "Bedtime, little man." My days are long and my evenings all too short. Usually, I'm only just arrived home from the office before it's time for him to sleep. We've barely seen each other this weekend.
Declan shares the blond mop and bright green eyes I had when I was his age, and to him everything is an adventure. He's a white-hot pulsar of enthusiasm and wonder, and I wish I got to spend more time with him. I give him the biggest hug in the history of affection, and he toddles toward his room. Summer reads him a story while I slice what looks to be a fantastic potato caraway bread she baked especially for tonight's meal.
A few minutes later, dinner is ready. Summer, Ben, and I sit down at the table in our backyard and survey the feast. Despite my kitchen ninjitsu, the steaks have nudged up toward medium. They're still gorgeous, however, with a deep-brown sear and a bright pink center. They're paired with just-picked sweet corn, roasted broccoli with Parmesan, and the aforementioned potato bread that Summer made, which couldn't have been easy or quick.
The table falls silent as we slice our steaks-the first sojourn into what will hopefully be a year of remarkable meals. My steak is unlike anything I've ever tasted. It blows the doors off the grain-fed steak I had the night before at the high-end steakhouse. But really, it's an apples-to-oranges comparison.
The grain-fed steak was a luscious, succulent thing. Heavily marbled with fat and practically falling apart, it had an exorbitant richness to it. A luxury, it was certainly delicious-and exactly as I expected it to be. It tasted like a well-prepared steak.
This steak, both because it is a different cut and because it's grass-fed, is less marbled. Also well-prepared (if I do say so)-it tastes nothing like I expected. It tastes far richer. Not gamier per se, but beefier. More like itself. It tastes like everything a person would like about a steak-cranked to eleven. And then shot into space. And then kissed by angels.
Grass-fed beef, unlike grain-fed beef, is the product of a specific time and place. It has qualities usually considered only when discussing fine wine. To eat a grass-fed steer is on some level to taste the land and the terroir the animal came from, lived in, and experienced.
I've read about terroir, but I've never really been privileged enough to experience it firsthand. I've taken the word of wine labels-the brief stories on the labels designed to conjure an image of some half-invented idyll that you too can supposedly experience if you will only buy a bottle-but I've rarely visited a location, then sampled its wares elsewhere and had my impressions of the place come rushing back. It's a heady experience.
The three of us pop open a bottle of Pinot Noir as the sun first glows orange, then fades to the deep crimson of our steak, before finally vanishing. I swirl the wine in my glass. The way this cow lived-its terroir-is reflected quite dramatically in this steak. In its very flesh. These steaks taste like fresh air, lazy afternoons among fruit trees, and a life lived at a slower pace. I'll be cooking this meat for the coming year-I wonder what will be reflected in me. I hope that, a year from now, I will find myself somehow improved. Somehow better. Perhaps, through some act of sympathetic magic, somehow more at peace with the world and my place in it.
It should be a very interesting year.
The Simplest Strip Steak
Time: About 30 minutes
Serves 2 to 4 people, depending on what you serve it with
The strip steak is a major muscle off the short loin primal. It has almost no connective tissue, so it can be cooked hot and fast. It's also relatively lean and cooks quickly. Be sure not to overcook or you'll lose what makes this cut great. (Be especially careful if it's grass-fed, as it'll cook even faster.)
It's a simple cut to cook for dinner parties. Just don't be an idiot and overdo it; let the meat speak for itself.
2 Kansas City strip steaks (or New York strip steaks, depending), about 1½ inches thick
2 tablespoons canola oil (or peanut, sunflower, or vegetable oil, or clarified butter)
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1. Thaw the steaks and bring them to room temperature. If you're short on time, you can thaw the steaks in about an hour by placing the still-packaged meat in a bowl in your sink with a thin stream of cold (not warm!) water running into it. The cold water is warmer than the frozen meat, and the constant stream will gently thaw it.
Don't do this during a drought. Also, don't do it if you have an enormous dog who will make your dinner her own. Not that this has ever happened to me.
Be sure to bring the meat fully to room temperature or it won't cook evenly. Don't worry about food-borne pathogens here-they live on the surface of the meat, and you're going to sear that to oblivion.
2. Bring your grill to 450°F. Use an independent oven thermometer on the grill grate if at all possible. Lid thermometers lie. If you don't have access to a grill, a cast-iron griddle or skillet works as well. Place it over your biggest burner and heat it until it smokes.
3. Rub the entire surface of the meat with the high-heat-tolerant fat of your choice, and shake off excess.
4. Season the steaks with salt and pepper. Use more than you think you need, and use more salt than pepper. Pepper can burn, while salt can't-it's a rock. Also, a lot of your seasoning will fall off, so don't be shy.
5. Grill the steaks to medium rare, with an internal temp of about 130°F. (If grain-fed: about 3 minutes per side, flipped twice, for a total of 12 minutes. If grass-fed: about 90 seconds per side, flipped twice, for a total of 6 minutes.)
To check for doneness, you can (a) use an instant-read thermometer or (b) use the finger test: Touch your middle finger to the tip of your thumb, then feel the fleshy part of your hand at the base of your thumb. That's what medium rare feels like. Or you can (c) cut into the steak to check.
6. Remove the steaks to a plate and cover loosely with aluminum foil; let rest for 10 minutes.
7. Plate and serve.
You know that bottle of Pinot Noir you've been saving for a special occasion? Now's a good time to break it out.
Copyright © 2015 by Jared Stone
