An Occasional Carnivore

My favorite cut of beef is the ribeye. It’s tender and it has the most marbling of any of the steak cuts. And marbling = fat = decadence. When you get a ribeye from a Wagyu cow, it’s uber decadent. Of course, this is the breed used for the famous Kobe beef, which is massaged with sake and fed beer (though this may be superfluous). The real deal can cost several hundred dollars per steak but I managed to procure some Australian stuff at Harmony Farms for under 20 bucks a pound. Here they call you "Ma'am" and "Sir" Of course grain fed beef from halfway around the world is not very carbon friendly – it takes 11,000 pounds of grain on the feedlot for the cow to add another 700 pounds of cow flesh, not to mention the diesel used on the freight journey. But I’ve already admitted to being a hypocrite in the previous entry and I had a tough day. Most of all, I’ve never actually cooked Wagyu before and I thought it was my duty to give it a whirl. So how to do it proper(ly)? Aussie Wagyu @ $20/lbTrue Kobe @ $135/lb If I were in Japan, I’d slice it super thin and dip in boiling water shabu-shabu style. But what is more uninteresting than boiled beef? There is a reason that Ruth’s Chris cooks their steaks at 1800 degrees and not 212. My sister insists that shabu-shabu is worth it for the sauces to which I say, gimme the sauces but grill the meat. Win-win. But slapping my steak on the Weber isn’t necessarily the best choice, either. Wagyu has a lot of unsaturated fats which means that they melt at a lower temperature. I don’t want to drain out all the good stuff so I had to figure out a way to cook it at a low temperature while still getting all the caramelized goodness of a well cooked steak. It is heat-safe. Enter sous-vide. Basically, it’s the fancy pants version of boil-in-a-bag. You take your food, dump it in a plastic bag and cook it for a long time at a low temperature. Though it’s exploded into the culinary zeitgeist over the past few years, it’s been in use in haute cuisine since the 1970s. It’s great because it cooks food while giving it a very tender, luscious texture. If I were to do it like food nerd/consultant, Dave Arnold, I would get a vacuum sealing machine and then comb eBay for a thermal circulator that some lab is trying to get rid of. But since I’m cheap and lazy, I use a Ziploc bag and a big pot of tepid water. The goal is to bring your meat to around 125 degrees internally, so my thought was to sous vide-ify my beef at around 110 degrees and sear it in a hot pan afterwards for a minute a side. I lightly seasoned my beef with salt, pepper and mustard powder out of reverence to my carnivorous grandfather. I popped it into the pot for around 15 minutes. At this stage there is no real fear of overcooking it since you’re cooking it basically at the temperature of a cow with a fever. A NOTE: Sous-vide translates from French to be “under vacuum,” meaning that there is no air in the plastic bag that holds your food. Vacuum sealers have air pumps that do the job for you but humans have a God-given air pump that works just as well. Just use a decent zip lock bag, close it 90% and, too paraphrase Lauren Bacall, you just put your lips together and suck. If the seal is good, you should get all of the air out and you won’t suck in any beef juice.No air bubble via sucking So after pulling my sack of beef out of the McGuyver-esque sous-vide set-up, I slapped the beef on a hot, dry pan and seared it for two and a half minutes on one side, a minute on the other. It still felt pretty soft pulling it off but after letting it rest for a few minutes, it was clear that I screwed up and overcooked my precious Wagyu. Good but not great Don’t get me wrong. It was still delicious and luscious and tender – almost to the point that it had the soft texture of liver – but the meat was medium and I, like any rational, respectful beef eaters, am a medium rare kind of guy. After my tears dried, I had a cursory self-debriefing where I determined that my method was correct (duh) but my meat was cut too thin. For a half inch thick piece of steak, either I should have done it sous-vide and eaten it all lukewarm and unbrowned, which is weird, or I should have just grilled it without that hoity-toity sous-vide business. Next time, I’m keeping the technique the same and doubling the thickness. Sorry, cow.

On the Beef Soapbox...

First of all, my apologies for my blog silence. John, as the only reader of the blog, I am truly sorry. But I haven’t stopped eating or cooking or thinking about food. A couple weeks ago, I went to hear Michael Pollan speak. He has a new book out that’s a primer for sustainable eating called In Defense of Food, a companion to his acclaimed The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The book’s mantra is, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Basically, he means that we should eat things that we recognize as food (sorry, Gogurt) in moderation. He’s not completely anti-meat, but he suggests that industrial farming has created a glut of artificially cheap meat at the expense of the environment, fossil fuel consumption and our own personal health. Sure. I’m two-thirds with you there, Mikey. But I can’t help but eat a lot. It’s not my fault food is so damned tasty.

My big criticism with his manifesto is that he says we’re not paying enough money for our food. That there are hidden costs that are paid through farm subsidies and in incalculable environmental damage (there is an dead zone the size of New Jersey in the Gulf of Mexico that cannot sustain fish because of fertilizer runoff from Iowa cornfields via the Mississippi River). And of course, he’s right, but how do you justify telling a low income family of five that they have no business buying $1.29/pound hamburger from Wal-Mart?

He acknowledges that the sustainable food movement is elitist but then he also cites women’s suffrage and environmentalism as movements that were started by the rich and privileged. The food thing is a little different because you can be environmentally aware and support women’s rights without spending extra money. The fact is grass fed ground beef can cost $8.75/pound (plus shipping). No matter what techniques they employ, it’s never going to come close to Wal-Mart prices. In fairness, it’s not so much that he’s saying that we should spend more on food, but as the hidden costs of industrial farming are realized, rising food prices are inevitable. Brace yourselves.

Speaking of beef, last night, I cooked a couple pounds of beef filet into a beef stroganoff which turned out really well. The beef was from Harris Ranch, the largest beef processor in California. It’s no Niman Ranch – it’s a basic feedlot – but at least they don’t feed the cows animal products. And it’s tasty stuff. Hm. What’s my point? I guess that it’s hard to adhere to Pollan’s lifestyle without spending a lot of money. The same beef I purchased at Harmony Farms meat market for thirty bucks would have cost a hundred from a grassfed beef supplier. It’s not like I eat that way every day. Or every week, for that matter. (On a side note, Harmony Farms also sells alligator, kangaroo, pheasant, caribou, bison, wild duck, etc. It's a trip.)

Trader Joe’s occasionally has some frozen grassfed steaks for $11/pound or so. They’re actually very good except that they’re carted in from Australia, so factor that into the carbon footprint equation. I just can’t win. A quick note on grassfed beef: because they generally have less fat of a different quality, they tend to cook more quickly and aren't usually as tender as cornfed beef. So keep that in mind when you're cooking them and consider using a Jaccard tenderizer. I do.

I will try to be better. But whether my next steak is from a grassfed bovine from Polyface Farms or if it’s defrosted from Trader Joe’s, I’m going to try Mark Bittman’s method of getting a meaty crust. It basically involved drying it out for a day or so in the fridge to concentrate some of the flavors – a poor man’s dry aging, as it were. But John, as my only reader and the one who introduced me to this method, you already know this. I’m basically wasting valuable digital space. So on that note…