A funny thing happened on my way to a beef tasting: I fell into a blog. Or rather into the rabbit hole of Blogville, flickring and twittering. As startled as Alice, I found in an apartment right in my own neighborhood a well-lit gang of young impassioned foodies, each equipped with cell-phone cameras, video cameras, mics. Yikes.
Chief blogger was a handsome private chef, Mark Tafoya, who with Jennifer Iannolo had set up a Food Blogger Playdate for some of their blogging pals. Like Jaden Hair of Steamy Kitchen, who was introducing us to black garlic; Anu Karwa of Swirl Events, who was vocalizing the wine; and Grace Piper of Fearless Cooking, who brought an awesome turnip puree. You can see the whole thing for yourself below:
I came with play-pal Carrie Oliver of the Artisan Beef Institute (also see her blog on artisan beef), who I introduced earlier on my blog. And it was Carrie who provided the main event —a tasting of five different beef steaks, some grass finished, some grain finished, some aged longer than others, but all of them from different breeds.
There was a Holstein-Frisian, a pure-bred Angus, an American Kobe (meaning Wagyu crossed with Angus), a Charolais, a Belted Galloway. What with the different breeds and feeds and places they came from (call it terroir if you must), they were a bit hard to compare but exciting to taste. All those subtle differences of flavor and texture. My tasting notes say such unhelpful things as “tastes of buttercups,” “caramelized nuts,” “Parmesan cheese,” “maple syrup.” Oh well. The language of wine tastings is just as idiotic.
What I really discovered is how food blogging has brought in a resurgence of older forms of communal food sharing, where dishes and information are shared as openly, joyfully and proudly as at an old-time church supper. We oohed and ahhed over Grace’s turnip dish and immediately took notes on how to do it at home. The bloggers are returning home cooking to our homes at the same time they’re enlarging our way of getting new, unheard-of ingredients from everywhere — like that black fermented garlic. Earthy Delights advertises it on Jaden’s blog and Jaden served it with chopped tomatoes as bruscetta.
And just as I’m finding my footing in the blog, I find the sky blackened by tweets. The New York Times alerted me to Maureen Evans’ recipes in tweet lingo sent out to the universe from her home in Northern Ireland. I hope her 140-character “tweets recipes” are going to obliterate with a touch of the keyboard the claims of greedy publishers over this last half century to any recipes they’ve published as THEIR property, instead of as shorthand notations of how-to, which by federal law cannot be copyrighted. In case you missed it, here’s one of Evans’ most triumphant notations:
Next time I have a potato, I’ll try out her strudel because it seems perfectly clear in all its essentials. And that’s all you need in a recipe. A tweet for steak might read:
Thick Beef Steak: s&p both sides; sear on h grill 5m; turn; rmove&rest 10 m. Srv w butter+herbs.
That took a mere 97 characters. No wonder Tweety Bird has always been one of my favorite characters. I wonder if I could video blog her eating a steak?
When I was in Paris last June, for the first time in years, I was surprised to find a long-loved friend on the menu of every bistro I went to — Steak Tartare. I’d forgotten how long it’d been missing from the menus of cafes and restaurants across America. In fact, it had been missing from my own kitchen. One forkful, however, and I remembered how passionate our friendship once had been.
My guess is that raw beef disappeared from the menus of America around 2003, about the time the Mad Cow scare came in. For decades, Steak Tartare had been a fabled item at places like the “The 21 Club,” but that was before raw fish became chic and raw beef and raw eggs taboo. Of course the E.coli tainted hamburgers of The Jack-in-the-Box chain in the mid-90s did nothing to reassure a nervous public, nor did last year’s recall of several hundred million pounds of ground beef from a California Meat Packing Company.
But does that mean we should Eat Beef No More? Of course not. It does mean that we should choose our beef carefully — choose it for quality, which puts top priority on flavor and wholesomeness. Industry’s runaway commodification of all our factory-raised foods, but most egregiously meat and poultry, has tried to con the public into equating Cheap with Good. That is dead wrong. Cheap is as cheap does, and cheap comes from mass production, which is the opposite of raising calves and cows properly — without hormones or antibiotics, feeding them properly on grass, processing them properly on a scale that is humane, manageable and safe.
Quality meat guarantees that the meat you buy is fresh meat, not fiddled with chemically to prolong its shelf life. In other words, we must distinguish between artisan beef and commodity beef. Common sense tells us that we must expect to pay more for real food than faux food. The French have always been smart about that.
Thank god artisan beef has returned to this country as part of the greening movement. At last, we have other places to buy meat than in behemoth supermarkets. At last, we are restoring heritage breeds, not just breeds that put on weight fast and are sent to market as obese teenagers. At last, we are replacing a forced-fed grain diet with a ruminant’s natural one of grass. At last, we’re letting cows put on flesh in their own sweet time, not according to the slaughter-house schedule. At last, we can restore Steak Tartare to our menus by choosing our beef carefully from a source that we trust, whether we buy it already ground or grind the cut ourselves.
One of the most luscious meats in the world comes from the increasingly popular breed called Wagyu (sometimes called Kobe because that’s the port this Japanese breed of beef was originally shipped from). This breed (even when it’s crossbred with Angus and other American breeds) is so highly marbled that it makes our USDA scale of select, choice and prime seem primitive. Some call it white beef because a Wagyu steak looks like a slab of white speckled with red. I call it beef butter because it is a thing unto itself, like foie gras.
To make a Tartare of ground Wagyu is to eat beef butter highly seasoned by spices yet smoothed by the richness of mayonnaise. By choosing a source you can trust, you can banish fear and guarantee pleasure, knowing you’re going to get maximum bang for whatever bucks you pay.
Wagyu Steak Tartare
From Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef by Betty Fussell (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008).
With a sharp knife, chop the meat as fine as you can and then chop again. (A processor will turn this beef to mush.) Next chop the anchovies, onion, capers, and parsley until they are uniform in size. In a large bowl beat the egg yolk with the mustard, Worcestershire, and cognac. Gradually beat in the olive oil until the mixture thickens. Add pepper and Tabasco. Add the meat and chopped ingredients and mix well but very gently with your hands to keep the meat light and air-filled. Form gently into four to six patties and top each with a toast point set upright. Yield: 4 servings.
A few online sources: snakeriverfarms.com, preferredmeats.com, lobels.com, debragga.com, heritagefoods.com, ranchfoodsdirect, com, lacensebeef.com, lasatergrasslandsbeef.com, eatwild.com.
There’s no better way to taste steak than to think of beef as wine. Is it full-bodied with a berry aftertaste? Does it have a buttery nose with hints of tobacco?
Today we know a lot more about wine than beef because we don’t know and often don’t want to know how that steak got on our plate — from what kind of cow, eating what kind of feed, in what kind of place, at what time of year? All of this affects taste mightily.
Just as wine depends on the variety of grape — where it’s grown, how it’s fermented and bottled — so beef depends on the breed of cattle, where and how it’s raised and fed, how it’s butchered and aged.
While there are 250 major beef varietals, the American market is dominated by a single type — Angus in one hybrid form or another because this is the breed that gets fattest fastest. But eating commodity beef is like drinking jug wine. It’ll get you through the day, but forget about taste. I mean, let’s talk about pleasure.
The best way to taste anything is to compare — as in a flight of wines. With wines we compare varieties, vintners, vintages. The possibilities are as endless as the degrees of buzz. Awhile back I tried out a heritage beef tasting at Murray’s Cheese in New York City and knew this flight would take off because none of us there had ever tasted 12 different breeds of beef at one sitting. We got to compare Wagyu to Belted Galloway, grass-finished to corn-finished, non-aged to truly aged. A new world opened.
So imagine my excitement when I recently found a person who has made a business of Artisan Beef Tastings through her Artisan Beef Institute. This is Carrie Oliver of Oliver Ranch, an enterprising gal, originally from California, who’s designed a marketing company to educate people about the wonderful world of beef. She’s been doing blind beef-tastings at a number of public events and is even selling “Discover Beef” tasting kits to do it yourself at home.
Cooking Up a Storm: "Egg"-cellent with Betty Fussell
Click Here to Listen! Cooking up a Storm
Betty Fussell stops by the Clocktower to pay a visit to Marja Samsom and conduct experiments in dessert alchemy. This episode highlights the egg-based dessert... [read more]
There’s no better way to taste steak than to think of beef as wine. Is it full-bodied with a berry aftertaste? Does it have a buttery nose with hints of tobacco?