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.

Summer Solstice is Carnage!

Last night my friends, Drew and Jenna, hosted grilled lobster night with me cooking. Truth be told, while I like lobster, I’m much more of a crab kind of guy. Better flavor, more versatile to cook with, blah, blah, blah. But it was the first hot day of the summer so grilled lobster seemed to be the appropriate plat du jour. I vaguely remembered seeing some cooking show where the guy split these live lobsters down the middle, slathered the insides with some sort of concoction and grilled them so I thought I’d do the same thing. It seemed to be a more humane way to kill them than dumping them in a pot. As I mentioned last week, it kinda sucks to deal with the crustacean death throes when you’re trying to entertain. I know some people will just have the fish monger steam their lobsters so they won’t have to deal with it, but the critters are still clanking around whether their in an industrial steamer or on your stovetop. Though I’ve never slaughtered a cow, my feeling is that anything you eat you should be prepared to kill. So I was mentally steeled to deal out some lobster death. Luckily, Drew, who had split lobsters before, offered to slaughter while I slathered. Thanks, Drew.

Lobster Slather 2 sticks of butter, softened 3 cloves of garlic, pressed or minced ½ onion, minced (or a big shallot) Juice of a lemon Chopped Italian parsley Chopped fresh thyme Salt and pepper Mash everything together.

It turns out that lobsters are hardy and obstinate creatures. Even split down the middle with their claws removed, lobsters continue to squirm. Their antennae twitch and their mouths flutter, as if gasping for air. It made slathering them with butter feel particularly savage. Post fact, I learned that some believe that lobsters are aware even when they are missing their appendages and cut in half. Oops. Between the initial carnage and me discovering that fact, I grilled the then unmoving lobsters and they were delicious, but I couldn't help but feel pangs of guilt in my lobster-filled gut. Later, I also learned that most lobsters go through this insane journey from Nova Scotia to Louisville (UPS’ hub city), where they are housed in a sort of lobster motel until they are overnighted to some restaurant or fish market where they flop around in a murky tank awaiting their torturous demise. I felt like the Hannibal Lecter of the ocean floor. I researched into other killing methods that were supposed to be "humane," but there was no definitive, painless way to murder a lobster. I even looked into the CrustaStun, a $4,000 gizmo that kills lobsters with 110 volts in five seconds. But then I thought, how big is the difference between five seconds of electrocution and 20 seconds of boiling water? It’s not like the lobster’s going to suffer from post traumatic stress disorder; either way it’s dead. And there’s even some debate whether lobsters even have a brain with which to feel pain. Sure they respond to physical stimuli, but, heck, so do plants. And wait a second - if I cut them in half, which half feels pain? I started to feel a little less homicidal (lobstercidal?). I mean, what's the big deal? While writing this, I’ve swatted three flies without remorse and isn’t a crustacean kind of like an overgrown underwater insect? Wait. By that logic, flies should be on my list of gastronomical treasures. Hm. On that note, it’s unlikely I’ll be eating lobster again any time soon.