Word: meatings
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...with shoe leather. Thanks to anti-BSE measures and rising feed prices, most cattle are slaughtered at less than 30 months; they're too young and too crowded in feedlots to develop profound beef flavor. Too many consumers have been led to believe that bright red, moist, plastic-wrapped meat will yield a succulent steak. The lives of cattle and humans alike would improve if people applied the golden rule of intelligent consumption to beef: less but better...
...Jamuz in the northwestern province of León. We knew that José Gordón Ferrero, the restaurant's beef-obsessed owner, had been rounding up old, free-ranging oxen, pasturing them for up to four years, and then dry-aging the meat for as long as three months. When I heard that he planned to slaughter five of these rare beasts for a side-by-side comparison of the effects of long aging on mature beef, I realized that for a mere $68 a kilo, I could settle the best-beef question for good...
...barbecue joints in Texas and a fortune on wagyu in Japan. I've eaten raw Arctic musk ox with my bare hands at Copenhagen's cutting-edge Nordic restaurant Noma, and I even took my husband to a strip club after I was tipped off that the best meat in Manhattan was to be had at Robert's Steakhouse in the Penthouse Gentlemen's Club. But after several samples of charcoal-grilled chuletón or prime rib at restaurants like Etxebarri in Axpe and Casa Nicolas in Tolosa, my radar homed in on northern Spain...
...that the sum qualities of an individual animal - feed, upbringing, genetics - are more important than breed or regional origin. The best beef is raised free-range on grass, with whole cereal and hay over the winter. Zaldúa says that two weeks of aging will tenderize the best meat, while no amount of aging can save the toughest...
...impossible to tell in advance which one holds the ultimate steak, for individual animals vary dramatically. Recent studies point to variations in genes for specific compounds like myostatin and calpain as factors in determining tenderness, but it would take between 20 and 40 years to breed toughness out of meat...