How to buy a steak

Feel the love? I do.

When selecting a steak, make sure you go to a good butcher, one who gives half a crap about his job. Just get good ingredients, cook them simply, and let them do the work, its easier than you think.

You want potato salad with that?

If you're buying a piece of meat from this guy, you might as well put away your little Foreman Champ, call for take-out, and swear on something important that you will never invite me over for dinner.

Dry Aging Vs. Wet
Basically you must buy any expensive cut dry aged. Say it with me, dryyyyy aaaaaged. That's good.

Dry aging is what they used to do to all good steaks, before food was seen as a commodity to make money with. They hang the meat in a strictly climate controlled room, at just the right temp and humidity levels, with just the right air circulation. This dries the meat somewhat and allows for the natural enzymes, mostly Pediococcus cerevisiae and P.acidilacticiti to start to break down the connective tissue between the muscles. The majority of this lovely enzymatic action occurs in the first 12-16 days of sitting around, but the good places do it longer, around 25-28 days.

Really, what is going on is a specifically controlled rotting of your steak. Yup, you read that correctly. But before you get all huffy, start eating goji berries and run off to some ashram to become a vegan, lets reflect for a moment on rotten foods.

Don't let this happen to you

Some of my favorite foods, are, in fact, "rotten" in the exact same way. Cheddar cheese, on your ham and egg breakfast sandwich? Rotten. That innocent curl of shaved piave on your arugula with lemon and salt? Rotten. Pork sausages? Rotten (yes all of them, the breakfast ones, the Italian ones, the chorizo, the andoullie). Pickles? Rotten. Soy sauce? Rotten (and its such a good marinade). Beer? Rotten. Sauerkraut on your hot dog? Rotten (and your little dog too!).

Now that you are over that fun little food fact, you either-

a: have really become a vegan (no tofu now, its rotten as well)
b: grasp that "rotten" actually just means good bacteria doing fun things like fermentation
c: can't stop thinking about food

The controlled enzyme all-nighter actually concentrates the flavor of the meat, and makes it more tender. It's difficult and expensive to do correctly, as you actually lose some meat in this process. The outer layer must be trimmed away due to the exposure, and the reduced water levels mean reduced weight. This means it costs more, but tastes better. Peter Lugers cares so much about their steak, they have their own aging rooms.

Wet aging involves wrapping the steak in plastic and letting it stew in its own juices. Gross. If a steak is wet aged it will be overly moist (not juicy), with a lack of flavor. It's close to what a steak should be, but just seems wrong; like plastic surgery, somethings off but its hard to pin down what it is.

Let's review.

Dry aged.

Wet aged

Grass Fed Beef
Grass is what a cow was designed to eat. The beef industry is going to tell you corn fed is fine, just like the tobacco industry tells you Joe Camel wasn't meant to market cigarettes for kids, or GM tells you/desperately tries to convince you that SUVs are a good idea. The little corn fiesta these poor cows are on is a far cry from a wholesome tortilla chip.

You wanna do what with that cob?

In order to bring a cow up to market weight in record time to make more cash (oh, mother nature is so behind the curve), its feed is supplemented daily with steroids, and protein; I'm not talking tofu here, it's from other animals. Now say what you will about the corn, but I have never seen a carnivorous cow, never. And seeing as how diseases typically infect humans after making the jump from one animal species to the next, this seems like a really, really bad idea.

The cows have to be pumped full of antibiotics so they don't keel over from eating this stuff all day, that's where 70-80% of ALL the antibiotics used in the U.S. go. And that's not increasing the likelihood of building any antibiotic resistant strains of some horrible disease or anything, right? Right? Want to know more? Read The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollen.

Grass fed beef is higher in Omega 3 fatty acids. Simmer down, this isn't crisco. Omega-3 fatty acids are considered essential fatty acids (EFA), which means that they are essential to human health but cannot be manufactured by the body. For this reason, omega-3 fatty acids must be obtained from food.

Essential fatty acids are polyunsaturated and grouped into two families, the omega-6 EFAs and the omega-3 EFAs. Although there are just minor differences in their molecular structure the two EFA families act very differently in the body.

The metabolic products (this means after you eat them) of omega 6 acids promote inflammation, blood clots and tumors, sweet. Omega 3s do the exact opposite. Ideally, you want to be at at 1:1 ratio of Omega 6 to 3.

Here's a chart-
Free range eggs...................1.5 : 1
Cheap ones..........................20 : 1
Farmed salmon.....................6 : 1
Wild salmon..........................1 : 1
Corn fed beef.........................6 : 1
Grass fed beef........................1 : 1

Funny, farm raised fish is fed corn, and has the same ratio as corn fed beef, huh, imagine that.

The purpose of this caffeine fueled rant? Next time someone raises their eyebrows at your rib-eye and starts waxing poetic about cholesterol while they dip into their trout almandine, you can tell them to suck it.

All the beef in Argentina is grass fed.
All of it, without exception. Need I say more?

Next week, we cook one.