table talk / By Joseph Byrd

What’s Your Beef?

Last September, the Arcata Co-op set aside several local beef ribs for “dry curing,” to sell as “prime rib” over the holidays. The cure, which allows enzymes in the beef to break down muscle fiber, is a traditional practice at expensive city steakhouses and boutique butcher shops. But again, because of the time, storage space and weight loss, it costs more. At $18 a pound, we couldn’t afford a big roast, so we got a one-and-a-half pound rib, searing it in a 450-degree oven to keep the interior rare. The flavor was noticeably better, but the meat still tough. (I spoke to Kevin Reed in the meat department, and he said that because of the extreme leanness of the beef, they recommend only slow cooking, even for steaks. But it’s nearly impossible to sauté a rare steak. Prime rib’s altogether different.)

Free-range cattle fed on a grass/plant diet, unavoidably, are going to be leaner, hence tougher. Remember those Texas longhorns? Their tough meat was one reason for the rise of chili: minced lean beef, spiced and cooked with lard. On cattle drives, cowboys almost never ate beef — they would slaughter a calf. Milk-fed veal is the ultimate in tenderness, and in fact their luxury meal was “son-of-a-bitch stew,” which contained not just the meat and offal, but the “margut,” or “marrow-gut,” a tube between two of the calf’s stomachs, filled with a cheesy substance resembling marrow. Texas historian Francis X. Tolbert says the chuck-wagon cooks got this idea from the plains Indians.

There’s a book that addresses all this in detail: Betty Fussell, a self-described “mad carnivore,” spent months visiting stock shows and ranches, talking with meat scientists and cattlemen, and getting to know environmentalists and feedlot operators. Her often surprising conclusions are in Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Love the idea of cattle romping in open pastures and munching on special, additive-free grains? Beware. As with much food marketing, “natural” means virtually nothing, simply that the meat product contains no artificial ingredients or injected brine. “Naturally raised,” on the other hand, indicates a set of USDA-approved practices.

But exactly what it means depends on the brand. In the end, because the food industry is not yet monolithic, there is a lot of variety, even within “naturally raised” beef. And other things influence taste besides marbling: breed, diet, stress on animals (like humane methods of slaughter — as Bill Niman says, fear creates adrenaline, which is never a good flavor), and regional differences all over the spectrum. Better to think of it the way we think of wine, offering choices to the educated consumer.

E-mail Joseph Byrd at eat.your.spinach@gmail.com

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