Review: A History of Beef, Times Two

by Betty Fussell

Just came upon a review from the Oct. 22, 2008 Time magazine, “A History of Beef, Times Two,” in which Gilbert Cruz compares Raising Steaks to Beef: The Untold Story of How Milk, Meat, and Muscle Shaped the World, by Andrew Rimas & Evan D.G.Fraser (William Morrow).

I was pleased that the reviewer’s verdict was to “skim” Beef but “read” Raising Steaks. For read, I’d say, “Chew on it,” particularly since he praised both books for reminding us “that as tasty as burgers and steak may be, there’s a price to be paid — in oil, land and treasure.”

Event: James Beard Foundation Hosts Betty Fussell

Reserve a seat for Wednesday, Sept. 16, at The Beard House (167 West 12th Street). Discussion starts at 12 p.m. Call 212.627.2308 to reserve.

The event is part of Beard on Books, an ongoing monthly literary series featuring readings and discussions with some of the food world’s most celebrated authors. More information is available here.

Hardcore carnivore Betty Fussell details the history of the American beef industry and evaluates the challenges that it faces today in Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef. Approaching the industry from every angle, Fussell’s critique of the world of beef leaves no steak unturned: she visits independent butchers and large-scale producers, meets a diverse cast of workers who live and breathe cow, and learns about our federal system for grading cuts of meat.

Mindful of the industry’s problems while reverent of its scale and impact on our food culture, Raising Steaks is a thorough, objective, and passionate survey of a decidedly American tradition.

Interviews with Friends and Mimosas Are Best

by Betty Fussell

I recently did a radio interview with Patrick Martins of Heritage Foods and Shanna Pacifico, chef at Back Forty, which aired live Aug. 9 on Heritage Radio Network.

Patrick broadcasts live on Sundays under the rubric “The Main Course” at Roberta’s Pizza, an oasis in the abandoned industrialism of Bushwick, Brooklyn. Patrick, Shanna and I chewed the fat while drinking a pitcher of freshly squeezed Mimosas and eating a brunch of polenta with poached eggs. Under the circumstances, it was real easy to talk.

Heritage Foods inaugurated a new beef program this year, the “Beef Cattle Share Program,” where you can buy online 1/8th of a grass-fed cow that will arrive at your doorstep cut into various prime steaks, stew cubes and ground for hamburger. While it’s not local (this year the program’s cattle were raised in California), it’s quality grass-fed beef, humanely raised, and it’s one way to cut costs by buying the cow on the hoof.

Does Rich Mean Fat or Flavor?

Photo by Rolando Jones

by Betty Fussell

In his recent review of Peter Hoffman’s Savoy Restaurant in New York City, Frank Bruni of The New York Times complains that the grass-fed beef that the Chef serves “doesn’t have the richness of the best grain-fed beef” and so isn’t worth the price.

Give me a break. Grain-fed means fat, both inside the muscle and out. Grain is not about flavor. The best grain-fed beef is aged post-mortem to give it the flavor it lacks from the feed. Grass-fed beef is a different sort of beast entirely, not only in what the steers are fed but in how we expect greened beef to taste. Taste is in the head before it’s on the tongue.

We don’t expect a wild duck to taste like a farm-raised White Pekin, nor a duck breast of any kind to taste like foie gras. Those French words mean “fat liver,” and it’s the unnatural amount of fat that gives that liver its superb buttery texture. I’ve always thought of it as duck butter. Since I love ordinary dairy-cow butter, I also love duck butter.

I also love beef butter. That’s what you get from highly marbled Wagyu/Kobe beef, whether purebred or crossed with Angus. Wagyu/Kobe costs a super amount of money because it is superfat. This is one reason why Bruni, along with most Americans and certainly the American beef industry, equates “richness” with high fat and high prices.

But if “richness” means flavor and intensity instead of fat, a whole new world opens. Fat can be a carrier of flavor but in itself its sensuous quality is texture not flavor. True flavor profiles, on the other hand, are as complicated with meats as they are with wines. One of the criticisms of the grain-fed beef industry about grass-feed beef is that it tastes “gamey.” Unfortunately, most of us Americans have lost the taste of what true game is — “wild” — because wild game cannot be legally sold in most states.

The application of USDA rules are so complicated on this issue that it does bear inspection (see Michaela York’s “Where Are the Wild Things?” in the May 2009 issue of Food Arts). The result is that for decades Americans who neither hunt nor have friends who hunt do not know what the taste of any wild thing is.

Most game sold as “wild” in restaurants is farm-raised (and grain-fed). Genuinely wild game feeds on all kinds of grasses and forage plants. The “richness” of wild game, which is notably lean rather than fat, depends not just on breed but on its intense flavors from all that foraging. While any game or beef flavor is deepened by aging, the flavors of grass-fed cattle are closer to the flavor spectrum of game than that of any corn-fed beast.

But why narrow our flavor range with beef by setting up a price/pleasure index that says high pleasure means high fat means high cost? Contrary to Wally Simpson, you can be too rich and too thin: too rich in mere fat and too thin in real flavor. Restaurant reviewers are no exception to the need to retrain the conditioned American palate.

A trip to Argentina (except for the governor of South Carolina) might be in order to discover the richness of exclusively grass-fed beef that the Argentines have delighted in from the first cow on the pampas. Or maybe a side trip to Australia and New Zealand. We don’t have to be parochial about our corn-fed idea that fat is the only thing that counts.

Blogging for Beef

by Betty Fussell

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:

Strudel Pastry: cut 2T butter/1c flour/mash tater. Knead w 2t yeast/2T h2o; rise 1h. On flour cloth gently pull 17×25”;trim-1:/butter well.

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?

Steak Tartare Rides Again

- cross-posted from Project Foodie

by Betty Fussell

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).

* 1½ pounds American Kobe sirloin, finely chopped
* 3 anchovy fillets, chopped
* 1 tablespoon chopped onion
* 1 tablespoon capers, rinsed
* 2 tablespoons chopped parsley leaves
* 1 large egg yolk
* 2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
* 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
* 1 teaspoon cognac
* 2 tablespoons olive oil
* ½ teaspoon black pepper
* Tabasco to taste
* Toast points

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.

Correction to “Raising Steaks”

by Betty Fussell

I’ve just heard from my friends Nicolette and Bill Niman that I’ve  made an inadvertent but egregious error in my text of Raising Steaks that I want to correct immediately because it raises an important issue in the raising of livestock.

After visiting Bill’s breathtakingly beautiful ranch in Bolinas, CA, a a few years ago, I’d gone on to visit the small Purple Sage Feedlot he’d used for his cattle in Caldwell, ID.  This was run by a knowledgeable and caring couple, Rob and Michelle Stokes, who now work with the many kinds of livestock the Nimans now raise exclusively on the pastures at Bolinas.

Back then, Rob had explained to me that the two common feeds standard in the cattle industry were feather meal and distiller grains. But I made a big mistake when I quoted Rob as saying “The two common feeds we use …”(page 114).

I’d never heard of feather meal, so Rob explained that it is made from hydrolyzed chicken feathers and is used because this protein content degrades slowly in a cow’s rumen and thereby helps utilize the animal’s entire gastrointestinal tract. What’s wrong with feather meal is that chicken feathers are an animal byproduct and at that time I didn’t realize the importance of this issue in matters of beef safety, not to mention matters of animal welfare in general.

After I learned a lot more in the course of writing this book about the relation of cattle feed to cattle diseases like E.coli and Mad Cow, I should have realized something was wrong with my notes if I had Rob saying he used this byproduct as a common feed. I quoted him wrongly and I’m particularly sorry because the Nimans, and the Stokes, have always strongly opposed feeding feather meal to animals.

Bill Niman first created his company out of concern for the health and wellbeing of livestock raised for meat and as an alternative to the increasingly scary methods used by the meat industry. Nicolette Hahn spent her lawyer’s career working on the impact of industrial food systems on our environment, as you can read in her new book,  Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms (see my earlier post).

That they are living that life as a married couple, with the Stokes living nearby, well — even though Bill has recently lost his own corporatized company, it still seems like a Technicolor ending with goats romping in the grass and Heidi running to her grandpa with some fresh cheese. We count on the Nimans and Stokes of this world to provide alternatives to that buffalo stampede of the entire industrialized food chain over the cliff.

A Flight of Steaks

by Betty Fussell

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.

Look up her website — www.oliverranch.com, and her blog, http://discoverbeef.blogspot.com.  Fasten your seat-belts, wine and beef lovers. It’s time for takeoff.

What’s Your Beef?

Leslie Cole has put together a wonderful beef primer. Head over to The Oregonian for lessons on what “grass-fed” and “natural” (not to be confused with “naturally raised”) really mean. Cole also includes a list of accepted definitions of terms found on meat labels.

Scroll down to the bottom for an interview with Betty about “the enduring confusion about brands, labels and claims.”

The Story of the Cow

A recent article in Slate looks at three books about beef, including Raising Steaks (though it is incorrectly referred to as “American Steak” in the first reference). Sara Dickerman writes:

Betty Fussell’s American Steak takes a picaresque approach to the American beef industry, examining through character sketches the story of American beef both light (how to cook carne asada) and dark (what happens inside a beef processing facility). In Beef: The Untold Story of How Milk, Meat, and Muscle Shaped the World, Andrew Rimas and Evan DJ Fraser take a longer-term look at bovines—examining the history of cattle, their co-evolution with humans, and their deep significance in mythology and culture. And in the academic collection Meat, Modernity, and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse, edited by historian Paula Young Lee, several scholars examine the modern invention of the slaughterhouse as a dark countermelody to the history of urbanism.