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.