STEAK E-Book

Mark Schatzker

• Herausgeber: Periscope
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Questing for the perfect cut of beef, award-winning food and travel writer Mark Schatzker embarks on an odyssey to four continents, travelling thousands of miles across eight countries and working his way through more than 100 lbs of steak prepared according to dozens of techniques. The result is an impassioned, funny and remarkably enlightening study of steak and its discontents as well as its many delights. Schatzker begins with a Proustian moment, a lovingly remembered morsel from his past. He goes on to explore beef myths and esoterica. Does marbling matter more than breed? Is a stressed animal less tasty? How does one read cow pies? Can umami be described accurately? Schatzker compares corn-fed to grass-fed ribeyes in Texas, ogles Angus bulls in Scotland and savours the famed Kobe beef of Japan. Lessons from each steak-conscious territory build upon those from the last, underscoring his major concern: do modern practices of commercial breeding and production sacrifice quality for quantity? Schatzker's inquisitive mind and comedic sense of timing keep his prose as lively as it is informative. As he aims for a unifying theory of steak, he even begins to raise his own cows for slaughter, leading him to a Zen-like revelation: the secret to great steak is, simply, great steak.

Leseprobe

STEAK

www.periscopebooks.co.uk

For my mother and father

Steak

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by

Periscope

An imprint of Garnet Publishing Limited

8 Southern Court, South Street

Reading RG1 4QS

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Copyright © Mark Schatzker, 2015

The right of Mark Schatzker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in reviews.

ISBN 9781859644522

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book has been typeset using Periscope UK, a font created specially for this imprint.

Typeset bywww.headandheartpublishingservices.com

Jacket design by James Nunn: www.jamesnunn.co.uk

Printed and bound in the UK by TJ International

Introduction: The Problem with Steak

Of all the meats, only one merits its own class of structure. There is no such place as a lamb house or pork house, but even a small town may have a steak house. No one ever celebrated a big sale by saying, “How about chicken?” Stag parties do not feature two-inch slabs of haddock. Certain occasions call for steak – the bigger the better.

Steak is king. Steak is what other meat wishes it could be. When a person thinks of meat, the picture that forms in his or her mind is a steak. It can be cooked, crosshatched from the grill and lying in its own juice in a pose suggestive of unmatched succulence, or it can be raw, blood-coloured and framed by white fat, the steak that sleeping bulldogs in vintage cartoons dream of.

Steak earns its esteem the old-fashioned way. People don’t eat it because it’s healthy, cheap or exotic; it isn’t considered any of these things. People love steak because of the way it makes them feel when they put it in their mouths. When crushed between an upper and a lower molar, steak delivers flavour, tenderness and juiciness in a combination equalled by no other meat. The note struck is deep and resonant. Steak is powerful. Steak is reassuring. Steak is satisfying in a way that only the pleasures of the flesh can be.

The best steak my father ever ate was one of his first. The year was 1952, and the steak was served at an establishment in Huntsville, Ontario called MacDonald’s Restaurant (not to be confused with McDonald’s, the world’s largest fast-food chain). At $3.95, it was a high-priced item, considering that my father would earn all of $35 that summer as an assistant director of a boys’ camp. An immigrant kid bent on med school, he found himself with money in his pocket for the first time in his life. On his first day off, he hitchhiked into town and bought himself a steak. It arrived sitting next to a pile of fried mushrooms, and it was huge: a sirloin, an inch thick and a foot wide, its edges drooping over the side of the plate. Nearly half a century after eating it, my father is still moved by memories of the experience. He calls it “the fulfilment of my gustatory dreams”.

The best steak my cousin Michel Gelobter ever ate was in the Sierra Nevada during the summer of 1980. He was working at a pack station high up in the mountains, living in a small shack with two other guides. Further down the slopes, horses and cattle were grazing the summer pastures. He saw the cow alive before it became his meal. It was an unusually tall black-and-white castrated male – a steer – standing in a corral, where it was getting fat on hay, sweet sagebrush and grass. A few weeks later, his boss delivered meat up to the cabin, and the men started with the tenderloin, which is known in fancy talk as the filet mignon. They put it in a pan with salt and pepper, then placed the pan inside a propane stove set to broil. Michel doesn’t remember cutting the steak or chewing it, but he does remember the flavour.

“It tasted buttery,” he says. “It was just slightly tougher than pâté and unbelievably juicy.” The steak brought all three men to the same level of extreme astonishment. “I don’t think any of us had ever had anything like it,” Michel recalls. “It felt like a freak of nature. It was the best steak we’d ever had.” When the steak was finished, Michel went over to inspect the remaining raw beef. It was a dark brownish red, with lots of streaks of white in it. Since then, my cousin has been searching. He has eaten “a fair amount of steak”, some of it very good, but none equal to the Sierra Nevada steak of 1980.

The best steak I ever ate gave way between my teeth like wet tissue paper under a heavy knife. There was a pop of bloody, beefy steak juice, and I had to close my lips to keep any of it from escaping. The problem is, this steak lives only in my imagination. I haven’t actually tasted it – not yet, anyway. It’s a false memory, of the culinary variety.

There have been, certainly, remarkable steaks in my past, most notably one at a Peruvian chain restaurant in a suburban mall in Santiago, Chile. It was served on its own plate, separate from the French fries, allowing the juice to pool in a manner that seemed premeditated. It was not the most tender steak I have ever eaten, but its deliciousness floored me. When I was done eating it, I raised the plate to my mouth, tipped it up, and gulped the juice in one long, excellent sip. I was ready to order another one, but I had a plane to catch.

Steak came to me the same way consciousness did. One day I woke up, and it was there. My father started grilling it when I was around nine, as I recall, which is to say that’s when he started sharing steak with his youngest son, because he had been buying and cooking it regularly ever since the trip to MacDonald’s Restaurant. By the age of eleven, I knew the difference between a New York Strip and a T-bone (the bone). When my parents visited their three boys at summer camp, they would bring cold steak, black cherries and icy cans of Coca-Cola.

My relationship with steak started getting, as they say, complicated in the early 1990s. My eldest brother Erik moved to South America, and began sending regular despatches on all the great steak he was eating. Every time I spoke to him on the phone, he evangelized about his latest filet or rib-eye, and I would hang up, jealous and hungry. One day he told me the secret to a great steak: season it only with salt and pepper. I went out and bought the most expensive steaks I could find and did as he said. The piece of meat on my plate tasted like textured salt water.

I did not give up. Most of the steaks I cooked resulted in textured salt water, but occasionally there was a standout. I bought a strip loin at an above-average grocery one day and pan-fried it according to a Julia Child recipe; it tasted so good I felt like taking to the streets and raving about its deliciousness through a megaphone. The next day, I returned to the same store and bought an identical-looking strip loin. It was terrible.

I began chasing steak in earnest the year I got married. My wife and I went to Tuscany for our honeymoon, and on our second night there we ate at a restaurant in Florence called Del Fagioli, a cosy little spot with chequered tablecloths and big flagons of Chianti. The waiter did not recommend pasta, veal marsala, or anything else I had, until actually visiting Italy, thought of as Italian food. His advice: “Get the steak.” We did, and when I swallowed the first bite, I let out a string of four-letter words and fell silent for a duration lasting more than a minute. Then I swore some more. The steak was that good.

A few years later, I found myself on what may turn out to be the greatest journalistic assignment of the century. To celebrate its twentieth anniversary, a glossy travel magazine called Condé Nast Traveler asked me to travel around the world in eighty days, the sole condition being that I wasn’t allowed to fly. I saw it as a well-funded steak excursion, and the first night I found myself driving through Chicago, a city famous for its excellent and huge steaks. I went to one of the pricier steak houses, one that claims to keep its own perfect bull down in Kentucky who has the enviable job of siring every one of the cows that provide the restaurant’s steaks. The rib-eye they served me looked perfect: black on the outside and red in the middle. It tasted like grilled tap water. A few days after that, still heading west, I drove over the Sierra Nevada – not too far from my cousin’s pack camp – and dropped thrillingly down into California. That night I ate in Napa Valley, and the steak was so good I decided to have a look at the local real estate prices (which ended up spoiling an otherwise perfect evening).

A cruise across the Pacific Ocean and a train ride north through China brought me to Mongolia, where I ate the worst steak of my life. It was a T-bone, half an inch thick, grilled over a gas flame and so tough that in mid-chew I had to pause to let my jaw muscles rest. But it was only slightly more disappointing than a steak I once ate in Las Vegas, at an old and hallowed steak house recommended by a hotel concierge who assured me it was better than all the others. The strip loin I ordered turned out to be more than an inch thick, and looked too big to ever fit inside my body. It was expertly crisscrossed with gridiron marks, and as I cut into it, red liquid poured onto my plate. The level of expectation approached the dramatic, but that’s where the story ended: at expectation. The meat had a watery texture and hardly any beef taste. It was one of the most expensive steaks I had ever ordered, and also among the most insipid. I took bite after bite, incredulous that something that looked so beefy could taste so limp. Eventually, I gave up. The waiter removed my plate and said: “It’s a big serving.” I nodded sheepishly and paid the bill.

Steak was now a problem. It had become a culinary version of the weather in England: occasionally beautiful, but on the whole depressing.

Unlike the weather, however, steak was something no one paid any attention to. During steak house dinners, people would spend a minute, tops, deciding on which cut to order before turning to the wine list, which they studied like it was scripture. The meal would inevitably degenerate into an ad hoc seminar on grape varieties. Should we go with a California cabernet? No, a big zinfandel for sure. But not too oaky – I hate oaky. The steak itself enjoyed the same status as the napkins or the ice water: people just accepted what was given to them.

Why was it that, in steak houses all over North America, people were talking about grape varieties and not cattle breeds? Why was there an entire aisle at my local newsagent’s devoted to wine magazines, but not so much as a newsletter about steak? Everyone loved steak, yet no one seemed to know a thing about it. What was going on?

What is it about steak, for that matter, that makes people want to eat so much of it? Why did my father continue to grill it on a near-weekly basis, even though no steak ever measured up to the one he ate in 1963? I suffered from the same disease. Like some pale-faced slot machine addict, I kept exchanging money for steak, hoping to strike gold, but steak after steak said: “Better luck next time.”

Why was the meat all so bland? And what could account for those rare standout steaks? What made the Sierra Nevada steak my cousin ate in 1980 so different from those he’s eaten since? I couldn’t find any answer – not at my local butcher, not in the pages of cookbooks and not, incidentally, among wine connoisseurs, all of whom are undiscerning steak eaters.

The world, it seemed, reserved its gustatory passion for things like single-cru soft-filtered olive oil, hundred-year-old balsamic vinegar, rare and exquisite Japanese sake, single-malt whisky, fine port and so forth. I knew of Italians who got into raised-voice arguments over buffalo-milk versus cow-milk mozzarella, Spaniards who feed acorns to pigs to make the ham more delicious and Americans who take barbecuing so seriously it has become a competitive sport.

So what was going on with steak? Had modern agriculture bled the flavour out in the name of efficiency and profit margins? Was steak just one more thing that wasn’t as good as it used to be? Or was the reverse true? Had steak been improved and perfected to the point that we were all eating the red-meat equivalent of single-cru soft-filtered olive oil, and I was just some deviant outlier, someone who preferred Italian or Chilean steak the way others prefer French cars or Japanese vacuum cleaners?

The latter seemed more likely, given that at any moment I could step out my front door and, within minutes, find myself consuming beer from Germany, mushrooms from Croatia, fish sauce from Thailand, cigars from Cuba or rum from Guatemala. If there was great steak out there, surely the forces of globalism would have found a way to put it on my plate. Like every other fine and expensive thing on the planet, it was just a matter of coming up with enough money.

But as I discovered in Mongolia, globalism missed the boat on mutton. This is the meat from a mature sheep, which the Western world gave up on long ago. (The only place it’s ever eaten these days is in nineteenth-century British novels.) The reason is that mutton is tough, with a taste so pungent as to be off-putting. Or so I was told. But two days after gnawing my way through that boot-tough steak in Mongolia, I found myself in agercamp deep in the Mongolian hinterland, preparing for a feast of mutton – which I presumed would be much worse than that steak. As the sky darkened, I sat in a tent and watched three Mongolian women prepare it in a traditional manner. They threw mutton chops into a huge wok, added potatoes, carrots and salt and pepper, and then opened the door to a wood-burning stove and retrieved several intensely hot rocks, which were tossed in with the same nonchalance as the carrots and potatoes. The rocks were so hot that where they touched mutton bone, the bone burst into flame. Some water was added. A lid came down, and as the mutton cooked, I braced myself for awful meat. But that’s not how the mutton tasted. The chops were as tender as any lamb I’d ever eaten, but the flavour was richer, deeper and better.

Mongolian mutton, I realized, was flying below everyone’s radar. Despite a world of meat eaters numbering in the billions and communication and distribution networks wrapping the planet like spider’s silk, I had to travel to Outer Mongolia to discover the joys of mutton chops.

Could the same be true of steak? Was there a land where all the beef was bursting with deliciousness, and the people ate nothing but good steak? Somewhere, there had to be someone who knew the secret.

That’s the day my search for steak became a quest. That’s the day I set out on a journey that would cover some 60,000 miles of this planet’s geography, taking me to seven countries on four continents and sending more than a hundred pounds of steak into my grateful mouth. That’s the day I booked a flight to Texas.

1 Texas

Texas is the beefiest state in the US. Even my cabdriver, who was from Pakistan, knew that. He was driving me to the airport for my flight to Dallas and, talking at the rearview mirror, asked why I was going. “To eat steak,” I said. He thought I was joking and let out a fake but courteous little chuckle. When he realized I was serious, he had this to say: “Sir, I think Texas has the very best steak in the world.”

“Really?” I said.

“Of this, I am sure.” Like all pontificating cabdrivers, he sounded sure.

The Plains Indians had felt the same way. Before Europeans ever set foot in what we now call Texas, grass grew as tall as a deer’s head, and the land was thick with bison, which the Plains Indians loved to eat. Long ago, these people had been cultivators of corn, but when they learned how to ride the horses that escaped from the white people, they gave up corn farming to trail the bison herds and make eating that meat a way of life.

The first cattlemen in Texas spoke Spanish. Their cattle roamed not far from present-day San Antonio in tall grass prairies and salt marshes. Thesevaqueros,as they were known, invented the wordranchand other standout examples of the cowboy lexicon – lariat, lasso, mustang, corral. English-speaking cowboys didn’t get to Texas until around 1815, where they discovered a feast of grass waiting for their herds. Within ten years, cattle outnumbered people twenty-two to one. By mid-century, a visitor travelling by stagecoach could peer out the window and see nothing for miles in every direction but cattle grazing on prairie, their heads lowered, tongues ripping grass and pulling it into their mouths.

In the early 1880s, a Welshman named David Christopher Jones became a cowboy. He had left his home in Pontypool, crossed the Atlantic Ocean and made his way to the Texas Panhandle, where he bought a chunk of hard land on the banks of Palo Duro Creek. His cattle had red, blotchy faces, grazed on buffalo grass and sipped water out of the creek. When they got big enough, they were driven north to the Flint Hills, way up in Kansas, where they spent the summer eating the better grass that grew there. Come September, the cattle were fat, the technical term for which is “finished”. A cow getting fat is “being finished” the same way a pie in the oven is “being baked”.

At one time, the only way a cow could get from Texas to New York was to walk. But by the 1880s, David Christopher Jones’s cattle were driven to the Kansas City Stockyards, slaughtered and sent by train to cities. The very best parts of those cattle were cut into steaks, which were served at better restaurants or sold at high-dollar butcher shops.

The D. C. Jones Ranch is still owned today by some of his descendants, but they don’t live there anymore. One hundred and eleven years after Jones set foot in Texas for the first time, the family was driven off the homestead for good, and it was because of steak.

The trouble occurred on 3 May 1995, when D. C. Jones’s great-great-grandson John Bergin, who was two, had to be airlifted to a hospital in Amarillo because there was manure in his lungs and he could not breathe. The manure was inhaled in the form of a windborne substance called fecal dust. John’s dad, David Bergin, believes it came from a feedlot on the other side of the creek called Palo Duro Feeders. Bergin is so sure, in fact, that he has brought a lawsuit against Palo Duro to recover damages for the injuries he claims his son and family have suffered from the feedlot’s operations.

Palo Duro Feeders had been raising cattle since the 1960s, but in the early 1990s, a new owner had expanded the operation considerably. Thirty thousand head of cattle now live huddled together in its open-air pens, and all are there for a single purpose: to gorge themselves on flaked corn. Nothing gets a cow finished like flaked corn, which is made by blasting whole corn kernels with steam and passing them through giant rollers, which flatten them into thumbnail-sized scabs of starch. Flaked corn looks, smells and, I am told, tastes something like cornflakes, but cows do not relish it because of its crunch. Being flat and thin, flaked corn has a high ratio of surface area to mass, which means a cow’s digestive system can process the starch quickly and efficiently. A feedlot cow eats about twenty-five pounds of flaked corn feed every day, and what is not absorbed exits the digestive tract as a wet, dark slop.

Something on the order of two million pounds of this slop was splatting onto the ground every day at Palo Duro Feeders. The evening is cooler than the sun-blasted day in West Texas, and according to David Bergin, that’s when the cattle at Palo Duro Feeders like to get up from their corn-fed stupor and stir. They walk over to the feed bunk and gulp down more mouthfuls of flaked corn, or they mosey over to the water trough for a drink. In their wake, clouds of baked manure get kicked up and are carried north on the breeze.

From the D. C. Jones Ranch, the fecal dust would appear as a dark fog advancing over the creek. Late at night, David Bergin would stand outside with his flashlight pointed skyward and track its beam through the cloud. The next morning, he would have to wipe down the windshield on his pickup truck.

In John Bergin’s first two and a half years of life, respiratory and sinus problems sent him to the doctor fifty-eight times. The night of 2 May 1995 was especially dry. It hadn’t rained in a week, and during the previous month less than an inch of precipitation fell. Dust was blowing, and John Bergin couldn’t breathe. Toxins found in the cell walls of bacteria that live in cow manure are known to trigger an immunological response in asthmatics. John’s airways were swollen, and he spent the night wheezing and coughing in his mother’s arms. The next morning, David Bergin drove his son to the hospital in nearby Spearman. John was placed in an oxygen tent but couldn’t achieve air exchange, so an air ambulance took him to Amarillo, where doctors admitted him to intensive care. When he recovered, the family moved into a house up the road in the town of Gruver. The Bergins haven’t lived on the D. C. Jones Ranch since.

As soon as the Bergins left the homestead, John’s health improved. He’s a teenager now, and plays basketball and football. On weekends he visits the old family homestead and keeps a few Longhorn and Corriente cows, descendants of the state’s original Spanish cows. “If ever there was a kid born a hundred years too late,” David Bergin told me, “it was John.”

You can smell Palo Duro Feeders before you can see it, and it does not smell like steak. On the drive north from Amarillo to Gruver on Highway 136, you hit a wall of shit-stink, a zone of mind-boggling reek that took over the interior of my rental car and defeated all traces of what had been, an instant earlier, pungent new car smell. A mile later, the cows appear – thousands of cows, most of them black, as far as the eye can see, lined up in rows and watching the passing cars and trucks like spectators at Wimbledon. One would dip its head into the concrete feed trough and come up with a mouthful of flaked corn feed, then return its gaze to the road. On the other side of Highway 136 was an empty field where, right out of a Texas postcard, horses were galloping. They would gallop in one direction, neigh, kick their hind legs in the air, shake their gorgeous manes in a manner suggestive of freedom, then gallop off in another direction.

A little ways ahead, but still well within the epicentre of stench, there was – unbelievably – a picnic area. I pulled over, opened the car door, and came face-to-face with the olfactory wallop of 32,000 defecating cattle. A wind was pelting my face with tiny particles of dust, and I stood there, awestruck by the magnitude of the aroma.

What I wanted to know was: How did these cows taste?

Delicious, you would think. And with good reason. History is replete with incidents of humans devising ways to make animals more delicious. Somewhere, sometime in ancient Egypt, someone figured out that merely feeding geese wasn’t sufficient – you had to force the grain down their throats, causing their livers to become large and tremendously fatty. More than 4,000 years after that eureka moment, millions of geese and ducks the world over have grain funnelled down their throats twice a day so that humans may enjoy their ultra-creamy livers, known as foie gras. Before a French chef cooks a crayfish alive, he grasps the middle segment of its tail and pulls it off, ripping out the creature’s digestive tract and thus removing any unsavoury crunchy bits. The Chinese despatch fleets of ships to pull sharks out of the oceans and cut their fins off for soup. No other part of the shark, apparently, can be used to make soup, so the sharks are returned to the sea alive but finless, and they sink and die. The greatest instance of cruelty in the name of food may be found in an unfortunate songbird called an ortolan. The French catch them wild and pluck out their eyes. A night feeder, the blinded bird gorges itself on a diet of millet and figs. Once fattened, it is drowned in cognac and sent to the oven.

The nearest restaurant to Palo Duro Feeders is El Vaquero. You find it eight miles north on the main street of the town of Gruver, near a Dairy Queen, a Phillips 66 gas station and a salon called Shear Style. Within the first thirty seconds of your arrival at El Vaquero, the probability is high that someone within earshot will say “y’all”. It has a marvellous terrazzo floor, each square of which is inlaid with the brand of a local rancher. David Bergin was sitting across the table from me, and he pointed out the D. C. Jones brand: a D and a C with a line running beneath the initials. (Spanish cowboys tend to have fancy-looking brands, but you don’t find many of those up in the Panhandle.) Years ago, the floor belonged to a hotel lobby where ranchers came to smoke cigars and talk rancher talk. In between their laconic, hardscrabble sentences, they fired bullets of dark saliva into spittoons on the floor.

El Vaquero’s menu gets right down to business and lists the steaks at the top, where you’d expect to find salads or soups. Sirloin Steak. Club Steak. Rib-eye Steak. Chicken-Fried Steak. David Bergin recommended the rib-eye. It arrived on a small silver platter – regal, festive, suggestive of Spanish influence – next to a heap of French fries and a grilled hot pepper.

The steak was not from Palo Duro Feeders. On the southern edge of Gruver, there is a hobby-sized feeder called Bob Cluck Pens, but the steak didn’t come from there, either. It was, rather, delivered by refrigerated truck from Amarillo, which is 100 miles south, by Ben E. Keith Foods.

The Ben E. Keith steak looked the way steak is supposed to: big, grey and crosshatched with black grill marks. Nestled next to it was a little plastic cup of dark steak sauce, but I opted to eat the steak “dry”. I was there to taste steak, after all, not steak sauce.

I took a bite. It was hot and tender enough, with the merest suggestion of beefiness. After a second or two of unmemorable but easy chewing, an undertone of sweetness appeared, but, as undertones go, it wasn’t easy to detect.

In terms of shape, the steak looked like a crude version of Africa, and somewhere near Cape Town was a curl of white fat that was comically easy to cut and glistened on the fork, but didn’t taste of much, either. Still, it was soft and succulent. With each morsel of meat I would include a little wedge of fat.

Halfway through, I succumbed, taking the little cup of sauce and drenching the steak. Now it had taste. Now it was meaty. Now it was juicy.

David Bergin poured sauce over his steak before takinga single bite. He was born in 1958, and he can remember some of the US’s last cattle drives. Considering the distances Texas cattle once covered on hoof, these were tiny efforts – only eight miles.He and his father would get on horseback, round up the cattle that were ready to be sold, and herd them up Highway 136 to Gruver, where they were prodded onto scales and loaded on a train bound for the Midwest.

David Bergin hasn’t raised cattle since he left the ranch, but he is no enemy of corn-feeding. Before the dust, he had his own little feedlot with fifty cattle, and later managed a feedlot for a huge company called Cargill. Today he is president of a bank, and some of his clients run feedlots. He still wears cowboy boots and a Stetson and carries a six-shooter in the cab of his truck to shoot coyotes and skunks. David Bergin is still a cowboy.

After dinner, on the drive south out of Gruver, I crossed back into the zone of reek and passed Palo Duro Feeders again. It was lit up by bright lights and shrouded in a dark fog of dust. The lights stay on late so that the cattle can feed long into the night.

Bill O’Brien is not a cowboy. He drives a sporty Lexus, does not wear a Stetson and lacks the heft of a cowboy. He is spry and has a big-toothed grin and the charm and confidence of a senator. But, like cowboys, O’Brien does raise a lot of food for the folks back east. He owns Palo Duro Feeders along with another feedlot called Texas Beef, which holds 12,000 more cattle than the one on Palo Duro Creek. He took me out to Texas Beef to have a look.

O’Brien is soft-spoken and upbeat by nature, but as we drove, he told me how big-city attitudes toward steak make him angry.TheNew York Times, he said, kept printing stories claiming that corn isn’t a “natural” feed for cattle. “If that isn’t the biggest bunch of bull,” he said, sounding disbelieving and hurt. To prove those urban journalists wrong, one day O’Brien opened the gate in the back of one of his feeding pens, giving the cows inside the option of leaving their corn-filled feed bunks for open pasture. The cows continued to eat their corn, but then wandered out and ate grass, and then, later still, they would wander back in and return to their corn. This, O’Brien said, proved that corn was a natural food. O’Brien printed his findings, calling his study group The International Center for the Study of Bovine Happiness, and posted it to a writer he considered one of the more egregiousNew York Timesoffenders, Marian Burros. “She just doesn’t like me,” O’Brien told me. “She’s an urban food writer. She’s never been to the country. I debunked the mythology she’s created, which is that it’s unnatural for cattle to eat grain. She doesn’t like it.” His study received no response. When the experiment was completed, the cattle were sent to the slaughterhouse. No one recorded how they tasted.

Like Palo Duro, Texas Beef stank from at least a mile out. We pulled in and drove down one of the wide alleyways between pens. O’Brien stopped and opened the windows. The cows were frightened by the car and backed away from the feed bunk. They stopped and stared at us, wide-eyed, blinking, ears twitching, then began inching forward. “Do these cattle look unhappy to you?” O’Brien asked.

The truth is, I couldn’t say. They were crowded together, 50,000 of them, in numbers and concentration you wouldn’t ever find in nature, standing in textbook filth next to an open-air sewage lagoon, eating a yellow powdery substance that was dispensed by a truck. And yet, no cows were moaning. There weren’t any dead ones covered in swarms of flies. No cow was lying on its side, panting and glassy-eyed. One cow, which I could hear but not see, was coughing.

We stepped out of the car for a better look. West Texas is a windy place, and for the second time in twenty-four hours – and also the second time in my life – my face was pelted by fecal dust. I put on my sunglasses, certain of one fact: I would not be happy living on a feedlot. But many of the things that bring me comfort – high-thread-count cotton, watching hockey and baseball in HD, fishing, eating steak – would not make a cow happy. A few cows stepped up to the feed bunk, dipped their heads down and took in mouthfuls of food. I stepped back into O’Brien’s Lexus.

O’Brien has big plans for Texas Beef. He wants to build a biodigester, which is a big high-tech fermentation tank that will somehow derive electricity from the tons and tons of manure. He just spent $6 million on a new feed mill. I walked into one of several shiny aluminium bays, large enough to park a dump truck, where O’Brien will store ingredients – mainly corn. The mill itself is a small industrial complex of tubes and silos where whole kernels of corn are steamed, flaked and mixed with other feed additives. It takes eight hours to manufacture enough feed for nearly 50,000 cows to eat in a single day.

Cows spend about five months at Texas Beef eating and crapping, after which they walk out 500 pounds heavier than when they arrived. Every week, 2,000 graduate. They step onto a semi-trailer-truck and are shipped to a slaughterhouse fifteen miles away in Cactus, Texas, which is owned by a large corporation called Swift, itself owned by a much larger Brazilian company called JBS – the biggest meat processor in the world. There they are killed, de-hided and sliced into cuts. The cuts are sealed in plastic, packed in boxes and loaded onto trucks that fan out from the Pacific to the Atlantic.

Not far from Texas Beef, O’Brien has an 8,000-acre farm where he grows wheat. A herd of wild pronghorn antelope had recently discovered that wheat and started helping themselves. We pulled into one of his fields and found pronghorns grazing on profit margins. Compared with corn-fattened cattle, pronghorn antelope are a vision of elegance. They have dainty hooves, shapely bodies and delicate,aerodynamic faces. As good as pronghorn antelope are at eating O’Brien’s wheat, they are even better at running. Up until about 20,000 years ago, they lived a high-strung life, getting chased on a daily basis by the now-extinct American cheetah. No animal on the continent can run as fast. If a pronghorn buck bolted through the nearby town of Dumas, he would get pulled over for speeding.

O’Brien demonstrated. He pulled onto the wheat field, which had been baked to an asphalt-like hardness by the Texas sun, and gunned the Lexus. The pronghorns dispersed, trotting this way and that. O’Brien nosed the car forward, and now they took off, their hind legs flicking back and forth at a rate reminiscent of an industrial sewing machine. We kept up for a few seconds, but the antelope would dart in one direction and then another, and it didn’t take long until they were behind us, the herd reformed, all of them back to an easy trot. As far as handling goes, a sporty Lexus has nothing on an extinct cheetah.

O’Brien pulled back onto the motorway, and the pronghorns returned to their eating. There wasn’t a mammalian heart that was beating faster. I asked O’Brien how pronghorn antelope taste. “Gamy,” was his answer.

Some twenty miles southwest of Texas Beef is the O’Brien family ranch. Centuries ago in Andalusia, Spain, a rancho referred to a hut where a cattle herder could grab some shut-eye. In America, the word became “ranch” and came to denote something considerably grander. O’Brien’s is situated next to a formerly rough-and-tumble old town called Tascosa, which used to boast no fewer than four brothels. Nearby is a cemetery, and one of the headstones contains the following epitaph:

Frenchie McCormack

Aug 11 1852

Jan 12 1941

Madame at Whore House

The ranch sits on a hilly and parched section of land near the Canadian River, which has carved out moments of inspiring grandeur from the West Texas limestone. Not far away is a box canyon where Billy the Kid used to hide stolen horses, and we rode out there on all-terrain vehicles to have a look. O’Brien’s granddaughter accompanied him while I followed along behind, nearly tumbling over a small cliff. We stopped at the top of the canyon on an outcropping of smooth rock and took in the fine view. In the rock beneath our feet, I noticed some peculiar holes. They were a few inches deep and almost perfectly round. O’Brien said they had been made by Indians, who would grind flour by spinning a cylindrical piece of wood over corn placed in a rocky depression. He has 7,000 cattle running on the ranch, and when they’re a year old he ships them to Texas Beef or Palo Duro Feeders to eat flaked corn. I looked at the Indian grinding holes and pondered how long it would take to mill a day’s worth of feed for 50,000 cattle with a cylindrical piece of wood.

The ranch house is big and comfy, the kind of place a sun-weary Spanish cowherd could take the nap of a lifetime. Next to it is a creek-fed pond, and we sat on the bank and ate a lunch of ham and cheese sandwiches on white bread with mayonnaise and mustard. As we ate, O’Brien warned against the dangers of letting the superficial trappings of wealth – fancy cars, society balls, yearly kitchen renovations – go to one’s head. He had bought the ranch from a man who’d wasted a lot of money on just that sort of frippery.

My hope was to taste some of O’Brien’s steak, but he didn’t have any available – or at least, none that he knew for certain was his. He gets his steak from his son Alex, who is a former pro tennis player and owns a business selling premium-quality steaks, which he buys from Swift. Some of the steaks originate in O’Brien’s feedlots and some in other feedlots, but no one knows which ones come from where exactly. On a single stretch of Texas motorway, I saw four Swift trucks all filled with boxed beef. Some of those boxes might have been O’Brien’s. Every day, all over the country, people are eating Palo Duro steaks, but no one is aware of it.

Ben E. Keith Foods, I later found out, buys beef from big companies. Sometimes Ben E. Keith buys its steak from Swift, though, according to their customer service representative, “not very often”. It is possible, then, but not likely, that the steak I ate at El Vaquero came from just down the road. I will never know. The only Palo Duro product I can say with certainty that I ingested was a small amount of fecal dust, though not enough to taste.

Two cowboys were standing out front of The Big Texan Steak Ranch when I pulled in, one big and one small. The big one was wearing a white Stetson, chaps and a red bandana around his neck, and was so tall you couldn’t miss him from Interstate 40. He was the restaurant’s sign – big enough to do battle with Godzilla and as perfect a specimen of Americana as the iconic “Welcome to Las Vegas” and “Hollywood” signs. The other cowboy, who had just walked down the restaurant’s patio steps, was wearing dark blue stovepipe jeans with a tight crotch, a big gold belt buckle and a black Stetson. His lips were thin, his eyes beady and his face looked as though it’d seen its fair share of bad weather, real and metaphorical. A gimp leg gave the cowboy, who appeared to be in his sixties, a slow, clopping amble. You could almost hear dry desert earth crunching under the leather soles of his boots, even though he was walking over tarmac. Full of steak, he heaved himself into the cab of a Ford minivan and drove off.

Inside, the steak house is done up to look like a rickety old saloon (though it seems doubtful that any Old West saloon ever got so big). A young woman in a sexy cowgirl outfit called me “honey” and took me to my table. Country music was playing, and the heads of dead ungulates – deer, moose, elk – were mounted on the wall. I took a seat at a table on the balcony, which wraps around the main dining room. It occurred to me that if there were a shoot-out and I got hit, I would crash through the wooden picket railing and fall onto one of the tables below, just like in the movies.

A waitress appeared wearing the same sexy cowboy outfit as the hostess, though she was less sexy. “What can I get you, honey?” she asked, enthusiasm bubbling over. One thing Texans have realized is that men enjoy walking into restaurants and being addressed as “honey”.

The Big Texan serves a steak called “The Texas King” that weighs a whopping seventy-two ounces. To appreciate a piece of meat of that magnitude, consider that a twelve-ounce steak qualifies as big at most restaurants. There are babies born – viable, long-lived babies – who weigh less than a Texas King. What is most remarkable about that steak, however, is that if you order it, you don’t have to pay for it.

The catch is that you have to finish it. According to my waitress, most do not. “We had a couple of guys in yesterday who thought they could do it,” she said. “They didn’t make it.”

Finishing a Texas King is not just a matter of eating, but of eating under pressure. Challengers are seated at a table set on a raised platform – a stage, basically – so that the other patrons can take in the drama. They have sixty minutes to transfer the steak from their plates to their stomachs, and a clock above them counts down every second. If they encounter any fat or gristle, they may set it aside, but they must eat every edible bit of steak, along with the shrimp cocktail, roll, potato, salad, and ranch beans that come with the meal. A garbage bin sits at the end of the table. The day before, a man midway through a Texas King lowered his head into it and vomited. Vomiting gets you disqualified.

And yet, many have bested the Texas King. Out of the more than 50,000 people who have attempted the feat, collectively ordering almost a quarter of a million pounds of steak, nearly 10,000 have succeeded. The record for eating a Texas King fastest was held for twenty-one years by a former Cincinnati Reds pitcher named Frank Pastore. He downed one in nine and a half minutes, but was dethroned by a professional hot dog eater named Joey Chestnut, who beat him by more than thirty seconds. A Texas King was once fed to a Bengal tiger, which swallowed it all in less than ninety seconds (including a fair bit of sniffing and licking), but he was spared the shrimp cocktail, bread and other accompaniments, so the record does not stand. A Canadian pro wrestler named Klondike Bill, now deceased, once ate two Texas Kings in under an hour. That works out to an average-sized steak every six minutes.

I asked for an average-sized rib-eye and gave myself more than six minutes. The Big Texan sprinkles Montreal steak seasoning on its steaks, but I wasn’t in Texas to taste food from Montreal, so I ordered it dry. It arrived, nevertheless, soaking in a half-inch of dark liquid, which the waitress explained was “au jus”. To the French, jus is the precious, intense, broth-like liquid that drips off beef as it roasts, but it didn’t seem likely that what was being billed as au jus was genuine jus, given that the steaks were grilled and that the liquid tasted strongly of powdered beef broth.

The steak itself was mildly worse than the one at El Vaquero: somewhat drier, somewhat tougher and a little sour, though in the end similar enough to be its first cousin. The only way to guarantee a succulent morsel was to carve a thin slice off and bathe it in the “au jus”. The best part, again, was that nub of fat.

I asked the manager where he got his steaks. In the thickest Texas twang I’d heard yet, he answered: “From a var-ah-ety of prov-ah-ders.” He singled out one in particular that does a lot of business with The Big Texan: IBP. Once known as Iowa Beef Processors, IBP is today part of an unimaginably huge company called Tyson Foods, the country’s largest marketer not only of beef but of chicken and pork, too. Tyson processes about 150,000 cattle per week, and each Texas King, at four and a half pounds, represents a small fraction of what the company churns out in a single second.

I pulled out of The Big Texan and back onto the interstate, which struck me as a slow-moving river with fast-food restaurant signs reminiscent of overhanging foliage. America’s steak heartland wasn’t living up to its billing. So far, the steak just wasn’t that good. Another question formed in my mind: What makes a good steak good, anyway?

In Texas, there are people who know how a steak will taste just by looking at it. Even children have the gift. And on yet another sun-dried West Texas morning in the city of Lubbock, fifty or so thirteen-year-olds were competing to see who could do it best.

Gawky and acne-challenged, they were gathered in a refrigerated room, dressed in long, white lab coats and hardhats and staring intently at six sides of beef. The deliciousness of each side was determined in silence, because talking is forbidden. Each competitor noted his or her findings on a clipboard, and after ten minutes a whistle blew and a woman yelled: “Rotate!” The group moved into another cold room, where more meat of indeterminate quality was waiting. When it was over, they handed in their score sheets for evaluation. The winner was a young man named Markus Miller, who scored 713 – 28 more than the boy in second place and 37 more than the top-ranked girl. Coming in last, with 149 points, was a boy from Hereford, Texas – a town named after a breed of cattle.

The Texas Tech Invitational Meat Evaluation Contest is one in an entire season of high school meat-judging events. Texas Tech itself is a university, with National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) football, baseball and basketball teams, all of which are known as the Red Raiders. It also fields a meat-judging team, and its contingent of Red Raiders is one of the best. The university hands out more than $50,000 every year in meat-judging scholarships. The team practices Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays for two hours, starting at 6.00 am. On Fridays, they get together after lunch and go to a nearby meatpacking plant to practice on fresh carcasses. Saturdays are called Super Saturdays. The team meets in the meat science lab at 4.00am, where coaches set up carcasses and cuts of meat to simulate the conditions of an actual competitive event. At noon, eight hours after arriving, they leave the meat lab. In a normal season, each member of the team will appraise thousands of pieces of meat.

The Invitational gives high school meat judgers a glimpse of a big-league venue. But do not make the mistake, as I did, of assuming the high school squads are manned exclusively by novices. Competitive meat judging can start as early as seventh grade, and in a group of fourteen-year-old judges, veterans may be found. A Red Raider named Matthew Morales – a junior when I met him – was twelve when he judged meat for the first time. He was competing against high school students older than he was, and he had to squeeze in front of bigger kids just to see the carcasses. When he found himself face-to-face with the raw meat, he got butterflies. “I was looking at four big old pieces of meat,” he remembers. “I didn’t know what to do. The coach told us to relax, to turn around and not look at the meat, then look at the meat again and focus. And it worked. I came fourteenth out of sixty or so kids.” By his twenty-first birthday, Morales estimates, he had judged carcasses numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

Just as a varsity football, baseball or basketball player who turns enough heads in college can turn pro, so can a meat judger. The US Department of Agriculture employs 200 meat graders, 140 of whom specialize in beef. In a single day, a USDA grader can judge as many as 1,200 beef carcasses, each requiring no more than six to eight seconds of the grader’s time. Like high school and college meat judgers – and just like the twelve-year-old Matthew Morales – the USDA grader is looking mainly for one thing: marbling.

Marbling consists of the grains, spots and streaks of fat within a steak. The rim of fat around a steak is not marbling, nor is the nub of fat in a rib-eye; but the small white dots and curls of fat spread throughout a steak’s red flesh are marbling. To a USDA grader, there is no greater quality that a piece of beef can possess. Steak with the highest amount of marbling is the best steak, period. It is called Prime. Next down in ranking is Choice, followed by Select, then Standard, which is “practically devoid” of marbling. A Standard steak is red through and through, its only fat found on the edges. It sells for a fraction of what Prime sells for. A Prime steak looks as if someone took a Standard steak, hung it on a wall and fired a shotgun loaded with fat into it.

Peter Luger, the famous New York steak house, claims that it has been serving “the finest USDA Prime steaks since 1887”. This cannot be true, because the USDA didn’t grade its first beef carcass until 1927. The reason it did so then was because by 1927, beef was being produced the same way as cars, furniture and clothing: it was being churned out of factories.

It hadn’t always been like that. Up until 1850 or so, beef was produced locally. Cowboys delivered cattle on the hoof to cities, where butchers would turn each animal into steaks and roasts. Quality control was in the hands of the cowboys. During a cattle drive from the Flint Hills in Kansas or the Sand Hills in Nebraska all the way to Chicago or New York City, it was their job to keep the cattle calm, move them at a moderate pace and graze them the whole way. The cowboys would clop into town sore and bowlegged, their spines herniated, but if the weather had cooperated and luck had been on their side, their cattle would be plump and delicious.

The railways put cowboys out of business. Instead of being shepherded to market, cattle started taking the train. Then a great American industrialist by the name of Gustavus Swift went and changed everything. The appearance to this day of the Swift name on refrigerated eighteen-wheelers on West Texas motorways is a testament to one man’s vision and legacy.

Henry Ford gets all the credit for inventing the assembly line, but the truth is that he borrowed the idea from Gustavus Swift, although in Swift’s version it was a disassembly line. Cattle arrived intact and fully operational at his packing plant at Chicago’s Union Stockyards. There they were killed, and their carcasses were carried by an overhead trolley system to various workstations. At each one a cut was sliced or an organ removed until the entire beast was fully dismantled. Once “dressed”, the beef was sent by refrigerated railcar – another Swift creation – to New York, Boston, Philadelphia or anywhere else beef was in demand.

By the early twentieth century, beef was becoming cheaper, but it wasn’t always good. Butchers, restaurateurs and hoteliers ordered beef without ever setting eyes on it or the person who raised it. Some of that beef was excellent, but some was terrible – tough, with a gamy, almost rancid taste. Years earlier, if a customer bought a lousy steak, she could take up the matter with her local butcher. The butcher, in turn, could make sure not to buy any more of those scrawny brown cows with the twisted horns from the cowboy with the heavy beard.

Now beef was coming via Chicago, from who knows where. Some came from dairy cows that had spent the last decade getting milked; some from emaciated, poorly cared-for cows fed on bad pasture; and some from well-bred steers that had been grazed on lush pasture, and maybe were fed a little grain, too. So the USDA decided to step in. Starting in 1927, they decreed what beef was delicious and what beef was not.

These pioneering USDA graders were faced with endless lines of beef carcasses of indeterminate quality funnelled in from all over the country. How did they determine which ones were the good ones? The best, if most impractical, method would have been to fry up at least a medallion of beef from every cow to see how it tasted. Instead, they determined the quality of a side of beef simply by looking at it. They looked for plump animals that weren’t too old. They looked at the inside of the ribs for fat, which they called “feathering”. They looked for fat on the flank, which they called “frosting”. The choicest, fattest, younger animals – amply feathered and frosted – received a grade of Prime.

By the 1960s, the USDA was no longer interested in feathering and frosting. Now they would take a side of beef, make an incision between the twelfth and thirteenth ribs and peer at virgin rib-eye. They were looking for little dots and curls of fat, for marbling. They still are today.

Marbling equals deliciousness. Every meat scientist I spoke to at Texas Tech sang the same refrain, and study after study has proven the point. Fat is flavour. Because it is softer than muscle, fat is also tenderness. Fat is juicy, a quality that has given rise to the “lubrication theory” of marbling. As the droplets of fat melt, the muscle fibres are lubricated, and so, too, are the teeth and tongue and the warm, wet cave that is the mouth, making for a moist and satisfying chew. Fat, furthermore, triggers salivation. A marbled steak goads the mouth into joining in the festival of juiciness.

Marbling is one of many topics that grip the imaginations of meat scientists. Here is a discipline that craves the certainty of physics and the penetrating insight of psychology. There are factors meat scientists can talk about at the level of micrograms: amino acids, moisture content, monounsaturated fats. They can measure tenderness to a minute degree using a Warner-Bratzler device, a contraption that adds weight to a cutting blade to determine the exact resistance of cooked steak. (The more weight required to cut the steak, the less tender it is.) But meat scientists also wrestle with the mysterious, intangible qualities bound up in meat – flavour, satisfaction, succulence – and attempt to render them into numbers, too.

A not-unusual day at the lab will see a meat scientist slip into a white lab coat and eat steak. These sessions, which can occur five times in the course of a single day at Texas Tech, are known as Beef Sensory Evaluations. They take place in a long, narrow, dimly lit space called the Sensory Evaluation Room. On the left wall is a row of seven booths separated by dividers, so that a person sitting at one cubicle has no idea what the people on either side of him think of the meat they’re eating. Red lights cast a trance-inducing glow that cancels out any potential cues of visual appeal. The ugly steak, after all, might be more delicious than all the others.