Mind of a Chef Aged Beef
Y ou know where you stand up with steak, right? Twenty-eight-day aged beef is good. Become up to 35 or even 42 days of dry out-ageing and, well, we're talking ribeye royalty. All that steak needs is béarnaise sauce and a pile of hot, rustling frites, and there you have information technology: perfection.
Except that, for certain chefs, enough is never enough. What happens if you age beef for threescore or 90 days, they enquire? How magical would that meat exist? And and then they do information technology. Which explains why nosotros are at present in the midst of an international steak-based arms race – 1 which the Dallas Chop House may have already won over in Texas, afterward information technology served a (and no, this is non a typo) 459-day aged steak last year. Eleven Madison Park in New York, meanwhile, has served a comparatively callow 140-day aged steak on its tasting bill of fare ("stunt beef", every bit ane TripAdvisor wag had it).
In London, ageing lengths are creeping upwards (there is a grass-fed 55-day steak at Hawksmoor, and seventy-24-hour interval Danish beef at Mash in Soho), and the Canary Wharf branch of Goodman steakhouse has establish a set up audition for its experiments in what executive chef Olly Bird calls "extreme ageing". Its latest 180-day aged rib should get on auction on Friday.
In Cumbria, James Cross is also pushing beef boundaries. Equally standard, his Ambleside restaurant, Lake Road Kitchen, serves steaks aged for 90 to 100 days, at which bespeak: "There is a pronounced increase in the meat'south flavor complication." But Cross has too taken beefiness beyond 150 days, and he invited me to fix a new Lake Road tape by tasting his "specialist" 199-twenty-four hours aged beefiness.
Cantankerous was first alerted to the possibilities of what Manhattan butcher George Faison once memorably described in Bon Appétit magazine as "controlled decomposition" (yummy, eh?) while working at New York'southward fabled eating place Per Se, and later at Noma. The Copenhagen restaurant would hang whole carcasses of 13-yr-one-time retired dairy cows for six months.
"It smells like roast beefiness when it's raw," enthuses Cross, who is at present similarly excited nearly the truffle, blue cheese and umami flavours that develop in his steaks from 90 days onwards. Increased enzymatic activeness in the meat breaks hitherto neutral molecules into myriad new flavours, which are intensified by the meat's moisture loss. In his kitchen, Cross strokes a striploin, revealing the mould blooms on the exterior fatty, which add together farther character.
We begin on the nursery slopes, tasting a 79-day steak. Sweet, yielding and flavoursome, its buttery fat already packs a distinct blue cheese season (a classic steak combination). Cross is less impressed. "This isn't life-changing. Information technology's very good beef, but we're looking for: 'Woah! What's going on?'"
At 99 days, you can gustatory modality what he means. The meat is dense, drier, less tender, only it has taken on a beautifully even char (watery meat twists as it cooks; it won't lie flat in the pan). It too bursts with flavour. Musky bluish cheese notes run throughout the meat via its marbling, just without dominating its natural beefy character. The exterior fatty is mineral, flinty. Altogether, it is a sensational mouthful. "It'due south conspicuously definable every bit steak," says Cross, "but we're getting towards a seriously complex bit of meat."
If the 99 is layered in its flavours, the 199 steak is explosive. As with the all-time charcuterie, everything is happening in your rima oris all at once, merely in a complementary, not-conflicting manner. At that place is game-tinged beefiness in there; earthy, bosky flavours; ripe cheesiness; fat, virtually floral sugariness; chemic astringency. Like really potent, extra-matured cheese, this beefiness also leaves my tongue prickling with acidic compounds, to an almost overwhelming extent.
Later on, my caput total of lingering fumes (you lot become a like result from inhaling pungent fresh truffles, Cantankerous tells me), I could feel a singled-out, chilli-like endorphin high coming on. "That," says Cantankerous, chewing in a state of wonder, "is admittedly wild."
Which is why, despite the hassle and expense of maturing such meat (which costs £21.l/100g at Goodman), chefs will undoubtedly carry on doing it – using controversial grain-fed cattle, as well. Grain-fed is the just beef that has the necessary marbling, without which the meat would dry out out too apace. Cross uses Belted Galloway beefiness from a semi-wooded Cumbrian farm where, later a varied natural diet, the cows are finished for six weeks on corn. That, he insists, is very different to "industrial-scale" US cattle farming: "I would not want to see millions of hectares of British farmland put over to growing corn to feed cows."
Cantankerous sees his 150-plus-day steaks – so far only served to guinea pigs – as a future tasting menu item, which will exist served in pocket-size portions with, say, a few pickled blueberrries. "For me, this is not a competition," he says. "The ageing is driven by ane affair: a quality eating experience. Meat that age is a sensation overload; a couple of mouthfuls is acceptable." It certainly is. This is meat which, fifty-fifty in such modest quantities, volition imprint itself on your memory. A full steak would exit many of u.s. begging for mercy.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/mar/11/extreme-aged-steak-meat-with-mould-on-gourmet
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