While searching the world for the best steak — a quest chronicled in the book he has starkly named Steak — writer Mark Schatzker had what can only be described as a man’s dream adventure.
He went on countless road trips, visited innumerable steakhouses, connected with long-lost relatives in Argentina, shopped in Tokyo’s surreally high-end food emporiums, and even got to play cowboy on the grassy hills of Idaho.
The Globe & Mail columnist and travel writer spent three years trying to come to what he describes as the “Grand Unified Theory of Steak” — cutting through the thicket of “facts” favouring marbling or grain- versus grass-feeding, into the denser scientific realm of hexane, beta-agonists, one-octen-3-ol and Maillard reactions. (The latter, in case you were curious, is what gives steak its tasty brown crust on the grill.)
A despairing early chapter of the book sees Schatzker in Texas, lost in steak country and seemingly unable to find a decent piece of beef anywhere he goes.
“None of the beef I had was good,” Schatzker recalls. “In a way there was no point in even going to Texas because you could eat that beef in New York. That’s just where it’s coming from — it’s all fed the same way. The taste of American beef today is all controlled by a handful of feedlot nutritionists.”
The feedlot — vast fattening pens darkly described by Schatzker as thick with clouds of fecal matter kicked up by the hooves of thousands of milling cattle — is the source of most of the beef we eat, fed on steamed and flaked corn to promote rapid growth of muscle and fat, a marvel of industrial agriculture far from the grassy open fields and slow maturation that Schatzker becomes convinced is the key to truly tasty steak.
And if industrial beef production is the problem, the modern steakhouse is just a distraction.
“Steakhouses are kind of like Disney — they sell you a themed experience. You could go in there and pretend that you’re in a saloon or a gentlemen’s club — Lone Star or Ruth’s Criss, it’s the same thing. Some of them put a rub on them and some of them drown them in butter but it’s the same steak. There’s no flavor; they add something in the kitchen, just like they add something to their decor.”
Ultimately, Schatzker thinks we should trust our own taste buds, ignore experts, and demand beef raised far from the feedlot.
“I think everyone needs to go a bit more slowly and stop worrying about consensus. I think this comes from wine culture, where everybody wants to be a connoisseur and there’s a real fear of looking ignorant — they want to talk the talk and wear the ascot and make pronouncements about vintages and ‘that was a dry summer.’ I think that’s b.s.”
