Year of the Cow (12 page)

The three of us stand there for a moment, hip deep in the High Sierra snowfall, and just wait. The air is cold and still, and none of us speak. Below us, almost the entire continental United States spreads out in hazy greens and pale, rusty browns.

Almost the entire continental United States, but not all.

I look up at the peak still towering above us. We're only 150 horizontal feet from summit, but a little more than 500 vertical feet. To get there, we'd have to continue upward another 200 feet—an hour, by our estimates—to what's called “the Notch.” There, we would all rope in and climb several hundred more feet up a rock wall that will be slippery with ice and snow, with a sheer 2,500-foot drop behind us, meaning instant death if we fall. If we succeed there, we'd then have to do it all again, only backward. In the dark.

We've hiked a long way to get here, but unfortunately this is where our ascent ends and we all know it. Eventually, Rich notices that we're no longer following and returns to us. Reluctantly, he agrees.

We stand there for a long moment, the four of us, and try to fix the experience in our memories.

Uriah speaks first. “We'll come back.”

“Hell, yes, we will,” Rich says.

“I'm free next weekend,” Zac offers.

I nod. “I think they have a loyalty program. Try two ascents, get your third free.” They chuckle.

Uriah turns to us and smiles a little. “You guys wanna learn how to glissade?”

Thirty seconds later, I tuck my trekking pole under my arm, face down the forty-five-degree slope to Iceberg Lake, and hurl myself forward—sliding furiously, chaotically, ridiculously—down the mountain on my ass, using the pole as a rudder. Laughing. All the way down.

 

Killer Jerky

Time: 16 to 21 hours, largely unattended

Serves lots. Enough to feed several people as they climb a mountain.

Jerky made at home is simple, healthy, and ridiculously delicious. It compares very favorably with anything you can buy in a store.

I adapted this method from Alton Brown's justifiably famous recipe.

2 pounds round steak or flank steak

1 cup Worcestershire sauce

1 cup soy sauce

2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper

1 teaspoon onion powder

1 teaspoon garlic powder

2 teaspoons liquid smoke

2 teaspoons red pepper flakes

1 tablespoon honey

TOOLS

Two (20- to 25-inch) bungee cords

Full-size (20-inch-square) box fan

Three (20-by-20-by-1-inch) furnace filters (economy grade or those labeled “better” are fine—just avoid any that contain fiberglass)

  
1.
If your meat is frozen, thaw it until it's still firm but not frozen solid. If your meat isn't frozen, stash it in the freezer for 30 to 45 minutes or so, just until it firms up. This will make the meat easier to slice thinly, as it won't wobble around.

  
2.
Slice the meat very thinly, following the grain lines in the muscle as closely as possible—cutting with the grain, not against it. Top round will have a thinner grain than flank steak, which means that top round will dry faster, but flank steak will hold together better in the finished product.

  
3.
Combine the rest of the ingredients in a freezer bag, then add the meat. Close the bag, sealing out as much air as possible, then massage the bag to make sure all the meat has contact with the liquid.

  
4.
Stash the bag in your fridge for about 6 hours.

  
5.
Discard the marinade and move the meat to a sheet pan lined with paper towels. Using more paper towels, pat the meat as dry as possible. Liquid removed here is liquid that won't have to be removed in the actual air-drying process.

  
6.
Lay out one of the furnace filters and place a layer of paper towels on top. Place strips of beef on top of the paper towels, parallel with the ridges in the furnace filter. Be careful not to crowd the strips; air needs to be able to pass freely around the meat.

  
7.
When you've placed about half of the meat on the towel, place another layer of paper towels on top of the meat.

  
8.
Repeat this process on a second furnace filter, with the remaining meat.

  
9.
When all the meat has found a home on one of the two furnace filters, stack one filter on top of the other. Then place the third furnace filter on top of that. At this point, all of the meat should be sandwiched between furnace filters. The end result: filter-towel-meat-towel, filter-towel-meat-towel, filter. The goal is to make something like a beefy, industrial club sandwich. The furnace filters are the bread, the paper towels are the cheese, the beef is, well, the meat.

10.
Using the bungee cords, strap the entire filter stack securely onto the front of the box fan. The fan should be able to sit upright without spilling beef slices.

11.
Turn the fan on high, and leave the contraption alone for 10 to 15 hours (or possibly more, if you live in a humid climate).

If you leave this contraption indoors, your house will smell like a smokehouse. However, if you leave it outdoors, especially overnight, you may attract nocturnal scavengers. In my opinion, smokehouses smell like heaven. But pointing the fan out a window works, too.

12.
Check the meat every hour, starting at about 10 hours. When it's appropriately dry and chewy (I prefer my jerky stiff but pliable), remove from the drying rig and store in an airtight container in a cool, dark place. Like a backpack.

13.
Throw away the furnace filters. Those things get nasty.

 

5

New Frontiers

Zac pulls his car to the curb in front of my house and kills the engine. All of us—Zac, Uriah, me, our gear, and our collective stench—sit motionless for a second.

I'm sore.

As an experiment, I poke every major muscle group on my body, starting with my biceps, crossing laterally across my chest, and then down to my ankles. Every single muscle responds with a dull ache. I ran a marathon a few years earlier and the resulting pain crippled me for three days. This is comparable.

I open the door, and we stumble out into my yard. Summer is at my front door in an apron, looking for all the world like some pseudo-Irish take on June Cleaver. “Welcome back,” she says with a smirk.

We head inside, dropping our gear in haphazard piles on the floor. “So yeah. ‘Mount Whitney—Come for the Summit, Stay for the McGriddles,'” I say.

“To be fair, they were delicious,” Uriah opines. “What's a successful summit attempt compared with a quality breakfast sandwich?”

Summer laughs. “Sandwich, schmandwich. I have a surprise.” She gestures to the kitchen, where she's laid out possibly the largest cut of beef I've yet seen. It's a mammoth thing, three or four pounds, easy. A squat, fat oblong of meat, several separate muscles all run together, with great seams of fat streaked throughout. It looks like a steak from a cartoon.

It's great to be home again.

Next to the slab of beef, there's a cookbook propped open on the counter. It's the book Chris sent me home with when I picked up the beef:
The Grassfed Gourmet Cookbook: Healthy Cooking and Good Living with Pasture-Raised Foods.
It's open to a recipe entitled “Super-Slow-Roasted Rosemary-Crusted Chuck Steak.”

Now we're talking. I don't really know that much about chuck steak.

What I do know is that the chuck primal is the biggest muscle group on the animal—it's essentially the shoulder of the beast. It does a tremendous amount of work moving the animal around and thus has an enormous amount of connective tissue holding it all together. Put differently, it has a very pronounced “beef” flavor, but it's like chewing a shoe unless that connective tissue is dealt with.

It's usually a roast, not a steak. It's generally used in a braise, and it's exemplary in that role. But the recipe Summer has called up is different—it calls for the steak to be roasted for a long time at a very low temperature in a dry oven. No liquid whatsoever. I've never done this before. I'm excited.

I don't even have to do any prep on this dish. Summer has already thawed the steak and prepared a dry rub heavy on fresh rosemary, salt, and garlic. I generously slap it with the spice rub, loosely cover it with foil, and give the steak and the spices some alone time.

I rejoin my wife and friends in the living room and collapse onto the sofa. Declan clambers excitedly up onto my lap, the only member of my family brave enough to sit near me—I'm pretty sure I smell like the Unibomber looks.

Uriah reaches into his pack at his feet and produces another wonder: a small bottle of whiskey. “I was saving this for a toast at summit,” he says. “I won't be able to take it on the plane back to Colorado. It'd be a shame to let it go to waste.”

“Good point,” Zac says.

“I'll get some glasses,” I offer. I make a very convincing imitation of a man trying to stand up, though I don't actually move.

Summer sighs. “Stay put, Grizzly Adams. I'll get them.”

When she returns, we explorers of the high, wild places toast to our most recent adventure. And then to our safe return. And then to the women we love. And I think there was something about Robert Frost, and two roads diverging in a yellow wood, and maybe a Walden quote or something. It was inspiring.

An hour later, Uriah's brother arrives to pick him up, and we send him off with promises of more adventures to come. Then, it's time for a beautiful piece of chuck steak to enter a dry, preheated oven.

I slip the steak in at 250 degrees, per the instructions. As with a braise, a key to cooking tougher pieces of meat is to keep the temperature very low. After a half hour, the directions call for me to lower the temperature to 170 and roast for about four hours, or until the internal temperature of the meat is between 120 and 125. Any higher, and the steak is ruined.

Thirty minutes later, I return to knock the temperature down to 170 degrees. But I have a problem: My oven doesn't go down to 170.

Okay, not really that big a problem. I'll just knock the temperature down as low as it goes, and I'm sure that will be close enough. This is not a complicated recipe. Surely the temperature control on modern ovens is sufficiently sophisticated that “low” will serve all my low-temperature roasting needs.

I return to my living room and to scintillating conversation.

Two and a half hours later, my house smells fantastic. Like herbs and roasting meat and all the pleasures of the hearth. Because my particular obsessive-compulsive permutation doesn't allow me to leave things alone, I slip into the kitchen to check on the steak. It's a big cut, so it will likely take most of the four hours mentioned in my recipe. However, I want to be sure to pull it before the temp inches above 125, lest the meal be ruined. I'm too tired and have waited too long to eat a steak that's been turned to shoe leather.

I open the oven and insert my meat thermometer into the steak.

Internal temperature: 157 degrees.

I wrecked it.

Not only did I wreck this meal, I wrecked it egregiously. I ruined this meal on a colossal scale. If they gave out awards for culinary imbecility, if there were some opposite of the James Beard Award—say, the Jimbo Mustache Award—I'd have that thing locked right down. I didn't just slightly overcook a steak, I missed the mark by thirty fucking degrees.

Far too late, I pull the steak.

When chuck is properly cooked, the connective tissue melts away. When it's subjected to high heat by mouth-breathing idiots like me, all that connective tissue remains intact. If this cut is to be edible at all, that connective tissue must be
cut
away, a laborious and potentially tricky prospect. I'm trying to make the best use of this animal that I possibly can—and throwing away an entire chuck steak without even trying to salvage it does not meet that lofty goal. I let the steak rest for a moment and grab my chef's knife.

Would a boning knife have been a better choice? Sure. Do I have a boning knife? I do not. Cutting the connective tissue away with a chef's knife is like performing surgery with a hatchet.

I slice the steak into comically small pieces in an attempt to excise as much of the connective tissue as possible. I'm only moderately successful. The pieces are tiny, which I find funny because this steak started as such a Flintstone-like mass of beef. Now we're eating beef Grape-Nuts.

The resultant meat is still chewy—very, very chewy—but the beef flavor is still remarkably strong. I'm intrigued. Overcooked as it is, the intense flavor of grass-fed chuck still punches through. We eat the steak dust in little piles, alongside roasted broccoli and heads of just steamed corn. Though the dish is definitely ruined, the meal isn't. If anything, I've provided plenty of fodder for conversation. Zac and I recount more of our High Sierra exploits, and Summer fills us in on what Dec's been doing in the time I've been away. As we chat and chew at about a 1:3 ratio, reflecting on the adventure just passed, I consider the adventure still to come. And I make a mental note of something.