The Man Who Ate Everything (34 page)

Fondo Bruno

Piemontese Meat Broth

Cesare uses the rosy meat from the breast of a white bovine creature peculiar to Piemonte, halfway between a veal calf and a steer. This deeply flavored broth can be used as the base for any hearty Italian soup, is indispensable in
sugo d’arrosto,
and adds a savory undertone to the browned sage and butter sauce for
tajarin
with white truffles.

Extra-virgin olive oil

2
^l
/2 pounds
vitello albese
or brisket of beef, cut into 3-inch pieces

3 fresh rosemary branches, each 6 inches long

1 celery stalk

1 garlic clove, peeled

1 onion, 3 to 4 inches in diameter, peeled and cut into eighths

2 tablespoons kosher salt

2 small ripe tomatoes, cored and seeded

3
^!
/2 quarts cold water

Put a wide 9- to 12-quart pan over high heat, film the bottom of the pan with olive oil, and brown the meat very well on all sides, lowering the flame if the meat juices threaten to burn. After the pieces of meat have browned on one side, begin adding the rosemary, celery, garlic, onion, and salt, waiting 30 seconds between additions as the meat continues to brown. When the meat juices begin to caramelize on the bottom of the pan, add the tomatoes.

When the meat is well browned, add the water. Let the water come to the boil, lower the heat, and simmer for 3 to 4 hours. During the first 30 minutes, skim the white foam that collects on the surface. Then cover partially and skim occasionally. Strain. Refrigerate any broth that you do not need for that day’s cooking; it will keep for 3 to 4 days if you boil it for 15 minutes before using. Makes 3 quarts.

When Italy Knew the Noodle

Q Did Marco Polo really introduce pasta to Italy from China?

A. Of course not. In 827, centuries before Marco Polo may or may not have voyaged to China, the Arabs conquered Sicily and brought noodles with them. Some Sicilian pasta dishes still bear Arabic names.

Los Angeles food writer and linguist Charles Perry has found traces of pasta in ancient Greece, in two Latin words borrowed from the Greek, and in the Talmud. (Are noodles leavened or unleavened?) He concludes that Italy knew the noodle long before the Arabs arrived.

Jane Grigson, the late cookery writer at the London
Observer
and author of many terrific cookbooks available in this country, believed that the Marco Polo canard had been hatched in the 1920s or 1930s in an advertisement for a Canadian spaghetti company.

February and September 1989

Where’s the Wagyu?

Three hundred dollars’ worth of Wagyu quivered and sweated on my countertop. I watched it, paralyzed by indecision and ignorance.

To the unaided eye, it looked like an ordinary, raw, boneless prime rib-eye steak, two pounds in weight and two and a half inches thick. But to my eyes, aided by reams of misinformation, this was Kobe beef, the most famous, expensive, and delicious beef in the world, taken from an ancient strain of Japanese black cattle that are raised on a
diet of beer and sake-soaked grain and pampered throughout their lives with massage and acupuncture.
Wa
means “Japanese” in Japanese and
gyu
means “cattle.”

Now for the first time ever, Wagyu was being imported into the United States and, to my unbelievable good fortune, was being sold exclusively by my friendly butcher, Charlie Gagliardo at Balducci’s in Greenwich Village, for $150 a pound. Minutes after hearing the news, I rushed down to Balducci’s, negotiated a ridiculously low wholesale price of $45 a pound, and returned home with a sheaf of press releases and a two-pound hunk of Wagyu. The surface of my Wagyu was intricately laced with delicate veins of off-white fat—by laboratory measurement,
three times
more marbling fat than U.S. prime-grade beef, though with lightly less, cholesterol. This is the fat that made Wagyu famous— rich and tender and juicy and sweet, the foie gras of beef.

But with only two hours left until dinner, how would I cook it? I felt like a diamond cutter—one slip and a fortune in Wagy
u
would be destroyed.

I sat next to my kitchen counter to keep an eye on-the Wagy
u
while I read through my Japanese cookbooks and the articles and publicity I had collected. I discovered how little reliable information is readily available in English about this culinary treasure. The best way to prepare Wagyu, I read, is to grill it or panfry it or cook it in
shabu shabu
or sukiyaki, or not to cook it at all and to serve it raw, like beef sashimi, sliced a generous eighth-inch thick and called
tataki.
When prepared like a steak, it should be left two inches thick or maybe cut down to a half inch, the fire should be very high or very low, the timing will be longer or maybe shorter than for U.S. beef, the external fat should be removed or left on, the ideal state of doneness is rare or maybe medium-well, and the perfect portion is a twelve-ounce slab or a three-ounce sliver.

Now, with only an hour remaining before dinner, I telephoned Mr. Nishi’s beeper. A Japanese meat broker working in New York, Mr. Nishi returned my call almost immediately from his car phone as he crossed the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan. In Japanese steak houses, he told me, Wagyu is either grilled over wood charcoal or panfried, nine ounces of meat for each person, often cooked medium-well, and served with vegetables and rice. It is crucial to achieve a good brown crust on the meat.

My favorite way of grilling a really thick steak—I adapted it years ago from one of Christopher Idone’s cookbooks—seemed ideal, so I cut all the external fat from my Wagyu; divided it crosswise into two thick steaks (for purposes of experimentation); salted them a few minutes before cooking so that some juices would come to the surface, where they would caramelize nicely; popped them briefly under a very hot broiler until the outside was crusty but not charred; transferred the Wagyu to a 350-degree oven, where the insides would finish cooking; took their temperature every few minutes with my instant-read meat thermometer; removed one steak when it had reached 120 degrees
for rare and the other at 140 degrees for medium-well; lightly peppered them; and let them rest for ten minutes. I called my wife to the table, cut each steak in two, and we began to eat.

The rare steak was tough, and its marbling fat had not melted into the flesh; its taste hinted at a sweet richness but was not strong enough to matter. The medium-well steak was fibrous, mealy, and nearly inedible.

Either I had ruined a king’s ransom in Wagyu, or Wagyu is a cruel and evil hoax. I had to know the truth. We took a plane to Hong Kong, boarded a ship for Japan, and two weeks later landed in Osaka. (This is a ludicrous route to Osaka, but my wife had business on the way.) We chose Osaka because its inhabitants are famous for dining to what the Japanese call
kui-daore,
or “surfeited collapse,” which coincides with my own aspirations, and also because Kimio Ito, the generous brother of a Japanese friend in New York, was ready to treat us to the best Wagyu feast in town, at a restaurant called Devon Steak.

We entered past a cooler piled high with slabs of beef even more thoroughly marbled than my Wagyu back home, sat in a booth around an immense stainless-steel griddle, and ordered a raw beef appetizer, a beef main course, beer, sake, and melon ice cream. While we ate the velvety rectangles of raw Wagyu (they tasted more like raw tuna than beef), followed by a grainy version of vichyssoise, a salad of iceberg lettuce, and a heavenly little baked Hokkaido potato, the chef stood at the open end of the booth and cooked our steak.

He buttered the griddle, layered cubes of fat and peeled garlic
cl
oves on it, placed a massive rib eye, three inches thick, on top of them, and covered everything with a copper dome for a minute or two, apparently to melt the fat and infuse the beef with the lightest garlic perfume. The cover was lifted, the garlic and fat Were scraped to one side, and the beef was doused with cognac and allowed to luxuriate for a minute or two more, again under its copper dome.

Then the cooking began in earnest. With visible concentration, the chef sliced off every bit of surface fat and separated the cap from the body of the rib eye, putting everything but the very heart of the beef to one side. He asked Kimio, who asked us how we liked our beef—we divided between rare and medium-rare_ and then he lightly salted the meat, rotated it on the griddle to caramelize every side, and ground a fine sprinkling of pepper over it. Several times the meat was cut in two, the cut sides were browned, and one half was moved to the warm edge of the griddle while the chef attended to the other.

Finally, most of the beef lay resting at the side while he worked on four small pieces of steak, each two inches by one inch by one-half. He frequently tested their internal condition by pressing them with a chopstick, and when he felt they were done, he lifted them onto one of the square mats of aluminum foil that sat on the warm edge of the griddle in front of each of us, scraped the griddle clean of cooked fat, and went on to the next portion. He worked slowly and carefully, with none of the samurai swordsmanship you see at Benihana.

By the end, each of us had received ten strips of steak, deliriously browned and almost crisp on the outside, rosy inside, and brimming with juice. The chef cooked the rib-eye cap last and then the cubes of Wagyu fat, which rendered crisp as goose cracklings. There was a little dish of dipping sauce at each place—soy, garlic, honey, miso, and a secret spice whose identity is known only to Devon Steak.

While my wife was in the ladies’ room, I made off with two of her Wagyu morsels for the scientific purpose of comparing her rare with my medium-rare. Mine won. It lacked none of the tenderness and moisture that steak can lose when you grill it medium; like most blood-red meat, hers lacked a rich beefy taste.

Wagyu is not a cruel and evil hoax. It is the best beef I have ever eaten, as tender and closely grained as the finest filet mignon, with the melting juiciness of the richest rib steak and the savor of less expensive cuts like hanger and skirt steak, though with a sweeter, more delicate character. It was also the most
expensive meal I’ve ever had. Kimio would not, of course, let us see the menu, but I noticed a placard on the way out of Devon Steak from which I inferred a price of 40,000 yen plus service and tax, or $340 a person. That makes Paris look like a fantastic bargain.

A few days later I was back in New York, padding down to Balducci’s again for more Wagyu. This time, I also bought a U.S. prime rib eye for comparison, identical except for its markedly more modest marbling. I improvised a griddle from a wide stainless-steel saute pan with a thick copper bottom and clumsily tried to follow the procedure I had observed in Osaka. The Wagyu was wonderful, at least half the equal of its cousin at Devon Steak. Next to it, rare U.S. prime tasted bloody, almost wild, and required lots of savage chomping and tearing; cooked medium, it became stringy and coarse and dry.

I have finally located someone who knows the facts about Wagyu, Dr. David Lunt, superintendent of the McGregor Research Center of Texas A&M University, where they have been raising Wagyu for several years now. Their hope is that U.S. ranchers, with production costs only 30 to 50 percent of those in Japan, will be able to ship Wagyu to the lucrative Japanese market, where it fetches $60 to $150 a pound at retail, depending on the cut and quality.

The Wagyu strain of cattle was probably brought to Japan as a draft animal from Manchuria and down the Korean Peninsula in the second century
a.d.,
at the same time that rice cultivation was introduced. Wagyu worked for at least a thousand years in the rice paddies before they were consumed as food. Most Wagyu are raised as a cottage industry on small family farms throughout Japan, though there are some large operations as well; many farmers haul their cattle to the region around Kobe for finishing and processing, because beef with the Kobe name still commands a higher price. Wagyu are not allowed to graze freely, and massage is used to soothe their stiff muscles, not to disperse their fat; they are occasionally fed beer to maintain a healthy population of
microbes in their rumen, or large stomach, not to flavor their flesh or keep them relaxed. The distinctive taste and marbling of Wagyu are partly genetic and partly the result of feeding methods; their fat contains a high ratio of monosaturated, oleic acid (also found in olive oil), which accounts for its buttery taste and moderate cholesterol.

The McGregor Research Center has just had its second Wagyu slaughter, and the Japanese flew over to appraise the meat. Just as U.S. government meat graders use a series of color photographs against which to compare the marbling in a slab of beef, Japanese graders use acrylic steaks, like the cute plastic food you see in the windows of Japanese restaurants. The Texas Wagyu was a perfect success—the Japanese experts gave it their highest possible rating.