Year of the Cow

by Jared Stone

  Round. Behind the sirloin, this is the hip and back leg of the animal. Another muscle group in near constant use, so it has a fair amount of connective tissue, but not a lot of fat. It’s huge, so I have a lot of cuts from here, mainly pot roasts, the odd round steak, eye round, and other cuts that generally benefit from moist, low, and slow cooking, like the descriptively labeled “stew meat.”

  Because they’re large sections of a large animal’s legs, the chuck and round primals are suitably enormous. The chuck is the largest primal on the animal. The round is the second largest. My future is filled with roasts.

  Flank. On the belly of the beast, just in front of the round. This cut is relatively thin with a pronounced grain structure. There’s really only one cut here—the flank steak. Not a lot of fat, but a fair bit of connective tissue.

  Plate. This primal is just in front of the flank, farther up on the animal’s stomach, just below the rib primal. This is where you’ll find short ribs, as well as the skirt steak, which is essentially a thinner, longer flank steak with a more pronounced grain structure. The Spanish word for “skirt steak” is fajita, or belt—and this cut was the traditional cut used for the Mexican dish. Meat here has a lot of connective tissue and a fair amount of fat, depending on the cut.

  Brisket. Finally returning to the front of the animal, the brisket consists of the chest muscles of the steer, between the two front legs. A brisket is only two muscles, the flat and the point, frequently cooked together. I have two briskets, each split into two pieces, making for four packages total. Good for Texas or Kansas City barbecue—as well as for Jewish cuisine, such as pastrami and corned beef (because kosher meat in the United States comes only from the front half of the animal). Absolutely riddled with connective tissue, so low and slow is a must.

  With that general beef road map in my mind, Eben goes into detail on some of the less common cuts. The crosscut shank is the shank, or leg, cut across the bone. Essentially, it’s beef osso buco. The flat iron steak is a piece of chuck from inside the shoulder blade, with a really thick band of connective tissue running through it. It turns out that once you remove that, this is the most tender cut of beef on the animal besides the tenderloin. Hanger steak is muscle that hangs between the kidneys of the animal. There’s only one per cow, and it needs to be used wisely. Petit tenders come from the chuck and are a poor man’s tenderloin.

  But the cut Eben has the strongest opinion on is the eye round.

  Specifically: The eye round just sucks. Or, more eloquently: “The most useless and misleading cut on the entire animal.”

  Naturally, I want to cook this immediately.

  The eye round is off the round primal, so it does a lot of work. It looks like a tenderloin, so people think they can treat it like one. They can’t. Because it does a lot of work, it has a lot of connective tissue interwoven in the muscle fibers. If it’s treated like tenderloin—that is, grilled hot and fast—that tissue will remain intact, resulting in a tough, nasty piece of meat. However, this cut is also very low in fat. Which means that if you cook it low and slow, it’ll dry out.

  The trick, then, lies in figuring out how to cook it fully without drying it out, while simultaneously dealing with the connective tissue in such a way that it doesn’t turn into a fleshy pink football.

  The answer Eben suggests: pho. (Pronounced “fuh.” Not “foe.” Not “foo.” Not “fah”-la-la-la-la. Nobody’s decking any halls here.)

  As fans of Vietnamese soup know, making pho involves painstakingly crafting an exquisite broth, keeping it lava hot, and dropping delicate slices of beef into it. The beef poaches in seconds, yielding a beautiful, savory soup. If done properly.

  If done improperly, one may look forward to a tepid bowl of raw beef, accompanied by a side of Listeria and the everlasting enmity of one’s friends and family.

  Undaunted by my recent, beginner-level failures, Summer and I give pho our best attempt one Saturday afternoon. The weather is sunny and SoCal gorgeous, and I’m walking on air. This is exactly the sort of dish I would never try were it not for the whole cow in my backyard. This is a little bit nuts and a whole lot exciting.

  We start with the broth. And, frankly, we’ll end with the broth. Because the broth is where this soup succeeds or fails. I have exemplary beef and high-quality produce—I made a special trip to the store just for the occasion. The ingredients, which will go into said broth, are simple. The broth itself—that’s where I can mess things up.

  “Alright, Stone,” I declare with some degree of brio. “The boy occupied?”

  “Legos,” she responds. That’s a big, fat yes.

  “Ready to make some soup?”

  “Pho sure,” she responds. Pronouncing the name of the soup correctly in that phrase—“fuh” sherr!—she has never sounded more like a Valley girl transplant than at this moment. I do not say this out loud, however, as I enjoy breathing and walking under my own power. “Let’s do the thing.”

  I begin by quartering some white onions while Summer starts filling a big pot with water. I toss the onions with some whole gingerroot in a little canola oil and lay them out on a sheet pan under my broiler to char. This is key. One theory of the etymology of pho is from feu, the French word for “fire.” Per this theory, when Vietnam was a French colony, they adopted the French tradition of charring their vegetables prior to inclusion in a stock to caramelize the sugars and get all the roasty-toasty goodness that the Maillard reaction could provide. In fact, this charred onion is one of the defining characteristics separating pho from other similar meat soups. Vietnamese cooks translated the French word for “fire” phonetically, and the national dish was born.

  Because I’m making a broth, I’m working with bones. In this case, five and a half pounds of grass-fed beef marrow bones. I slip them into the water and crank up the heat. My sad little gas range, so eager to blast my chuck steak into oblivion, now struggles to boil these eight quarts of water. I hover nearby expectantly, literally waiting for a pot to boil. It’s very clear, however, that this will take a while. The two of us stand in the kitchen, momentarily taskless.

  “So we have a few minutes?” Summer asks.

  “Until the water boils, however long that takes.”

  “On this range? That’s a while,” she says. “I have an idea.” She pops into the other room and returns with a slim wooden box. A chess set.

  “You want to play me in chess?”

  “I want to destroy you in chess.”

  “Oh, honey. You’re so cute when you’re ruthless.”

  She grins and sets up the board. We begin to play. She’s good at this.

  Thirty minutes or so later, I’m about to lose my queen. Meanwhile, in my stockpot, I have bubbles. I let the concoction boil vigorously for fifteen minutes or so, actually lose my queen, then pour out the water we boiled the bones in. This initial blanch is just to coagulate the proteins of the blood and fat and similar undesirables that I would otherwise have to skim off the broth as it cooks.

  I return my attention to the chessboard. “Dec’s been awfully quiet.”

  “Legos. I’m telling you,” Summer muses, eyes on the board. “He’s absolutely nuts about them.” With deft fingers, she slides a bishop to the center. “I’ll go check on him.” She stands up and kisses me on the cheek. “That’s mate, by the way.”

  As she leaves the room, I look down at the board. She’s right. “I’m so glad we had this time together,” I call out, half sarcastically. Her only response is laughter.

  Back to the soup. Blanching done, I pour another six quarts of water over the bones and put the pot back on the heat. I have to return this new water to a boil—again. I can’t rush this. I couldn’t if I wanted to. But I do have to pay attention to it; I can’t play video games or leave the area entirely to go do something else. I have to be here.

  I toss my phone on top of a bookcase in my dining room, wondering how to pass the time. There, on my to-read shelf, I have more than a couple of books I’ve be
en meaning to put eyes on—I just haven’t had the chance. I pick up Lev Grossman’s The Magicians and sit down on the couch. This book has been on my shelf for a few months now, though I haven’t yet had a chance to open it. I sit and turn to the first page, indulging in what has somehow become a rarer delight than I’d prefer.

  I have another twenty minutes before the liquid boils again. Once I have a rolling boil, I add the charred onions and ginger, a cinnamon stick, some whole coriander seeds, some fennel seeds, a cardamom pod, some cloves, and half a dozen star anise pods.

  Star anise is my first I-love-that-flavor-but-I-don’t-know-where-it-comes-from revelation of the day. It tastes slightly of licorice, but in the best way possible. Not at all in a Grandma’s-leftover-Halloween-candy way. There’s a slight earthiness to it. A tang in the same olfactory universe, for me, as cloves. If I’d omitted it, I wouldn’t be able to say what was missing. But I’d miss it.

  Spices in, I follow up with some salt, sugar, and fish sauce.

  Fish sauce is my second that’s-what-that-is! moment. First, it’s an astounding creation. It’s made by piling several tons of fish into a vat—usually some variety of sardines, but it varies—adding salt, and letting the mass ferment. The resultant liquid runoff is salty and somehow brothy—with just a touch of fishy sourness that sounds utterly revolting but tastes like every good thought your mother ever had about you. It’s just loaded with umami, otherwise known as “the fifth taste,” after sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. Umami perhaps is best described as a sort of savoriness, a particular meaty fullness that you can feel on the palate and the back of the throat. In this case, however, umami is what makes fish sauce glorious. It’s another thing I’ve tasted a thousand times but would never have recognized as missing had I not been present at the creation of this soup. It’s a revelation.

  Summer drifts through the kitchen with a groggy little boy on her hip. “Hey, little man,” I greet him. His only answer is to rub a sleepy fist into his eye.

  “He’s pretty pooped,” Summer says. She smells the air. “Something smells good in here.”

  I hold up the jar of fish sauce as explanation for the scent.

  “It’s a sauce for fish?”

  “It’s a sauce of fish.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s the decocted syrupy runoff of a couple tons of rotten sardines.”

  “Oh,” she says. “Got it. I’ll leave you to it, then.” Dec buries his face into her neck. “Could you whip up some noodles for the kiddo?”

  “No problem.” I switch gears briefly to make dinner for Declan. At this rate, he won’t make it to dinnertime. That done, I return my attention to the soup.

  Once all the spices have been added to the liquid on the stove, I reduce the heat to a simmer and sit back down with my book. This simmer will take several hours, with my only task being to skim now and again to remove anything that looks unappetizing. I can’t really speed up this soup, so I have to slow down.

  An hour or so later, I kiss my son on his blond moppet head and tuck him into bed. Then Summer and I chat while I prepare some condiments and accoutrements to accompany the soup.

  I pour us each a glass of wine, and we talk about everything and nothing. All the little things we haven’t gotten to speak about lately, what with our commutes and disparate schedules and sometimes conflicting daily imperatives. So now, as the soup simmers, we catch up on our days. On our everythings. On the million little details with which we fill our waking hours. It’s nice. A moment just for us.

  Soon enough, the broth is ready. I prep some rice noodles and pull the eye round from the freezer to thaw until it’s still firm, but not frozen, which will make it easier to shear into slices of nanometric thinness.

  The grain on eye round runs lengthwise through the roast from end to end. I slice the roast laterally, across the grain, as thinly as I possibly can. This is key; I’m not doing anything chemically to break down the connective tissue that riddles this cut (i.e., melting it in a long braise), so I need to break down that connective tissue mechanically. I need thin slices.

  I set the condiment platter on the table. The magical part of pho, at least from my wife’s point of view, is that it’s served with a panoply of condiments and accoutrements and largely prepared in the bowl. There is no anticipating what people may enjoy in their soup—they prepare it themselves. We’re accompanying our soup with basil leaves, cilantro, mint, sliced jalapeño, bean sprouts, lime, fish sauce, hoisin, more fish sauce, and plenty of Sriracha. And fish sauce.

  I strain the liquid to remove anything chunky, and I’m left with a delicate golden broth just erupting with umami. I was excited before—now I’m ecstatic. I play it cool, though, to allow Summer to be duly and appropriately surprised. “What, this little thing? Just something I threw together,” I imagine myself saying. “Please, have a seat. I’ll be by with a warm towel and apéritif momentarily. So glad you could join me for a little quelque chose à manger.” Of course, I say none of this.

  “Someone’s in a good mood,” Summer notes.

  “Oh, yeah. You know,” I stammer with characteristic grace. “This soup’s gonna be stupid good.” Nice.

  We slip delicate slivers of glistening-pink beef into two bowls, then I ladle screamingly hot broth into each. The meat instantly poaches, darkening to a soft gray with just a touch of rose remaining in the center.

  I pause, the recent failure of the Roast I Wrecked looming large in the back of my mind. Finally, I dip my spoon beneath the surface of the golden liquid and taste my handiwork.

  Glorious.

  “Wow,” I hear my wife say from somewhere far off in the distant reaches of my soup-induced Pleasuretorium. “Nice work, Stone.”

  It’s possibly not only the best soup I’ve ever made, but the best dish I’ve ever made of any variety. It’s joy in a bowl. It’s savory and delightful and rich—and a far better dish than I have any business creating.

  We ply the broth with our accoutrements and pour another glass of wine. I’m heartened by this success after such a spectacular failure.

  There’s hope for this project yet.

  * * *

  My job may be a hot ball of stress dipped in anxiety and amphetamines, but my weekends are wonderlands of culinary experimentation. As I explore the beef that occupies my freezer, I realize that dealing with connective tissue is a major consideration. More than only thinking about it when I make a pot roast—connective tissue is a constant that I face with every cut in some capacity or another; it isn’t something I can skip or evade or put off—it has to be dealt with. Since the two largest primals, chuck and round, contribute tremendously to moving the animal around—they are hunks of legs, after all—they have correspondingly large amounts of connective tissue, which is decidedly not delicious.

  Connective tissue comes in two main types—elastin and collagen. Elastin is, oddly enough, elastic. It’s the reason, for example, that skin snaps back into place after it’s been pinched. It usually forms in thick bands and is fairly obvious to the eye.

  Collagen, on the other hand, generally forms in threads between the muscle fibers themselves, though those threads can be quite thick in places. It’s also an ingredient commonly added to lotions and beauty creams for the purpose of making them more expensive. (Also, it might decrease signs of aging. But mostly the first thing.)

  When a piece of meat is cooked in a liquid at relatively low temperatures for a long period of time—that is, braised—the collagen in the meat transforms into another type of protein: gelatin. This aptly named protein is a powerful gelling agent and is the primary ingredient in Jell-O, as well as many similarly textured foods.

  In a pot roast or other braise, this gelatin thickens whatever flavorful liquid the roast is cooked in, resulting in a sauce with a smooth, lovely mouthfeel. It’s the reason why chefs boil bones when they’re making soup and why enthusiastic amateurs boil bones when they’re making pho. This transformation is a really remarkable bit of culin
ary alchemy—turning chewy, unappetizing collagen into rich, gorgeous sauces. Making lowly, tough cuts of meat into something divine.

  From a chemical standpoint, the liquid that the roast is braised in isn’t important so long as there is enough water content to facilitate the conversion of collagen into gelatin. From a culinary standpoint, it’s nice to choose a liquid that complements the dish. Beef stock is an obvious choice. It doubles down on the beefy goodness already present in the cut. Wine is lovely—it adds a little acid and then turns a little sweet during the process as most of the alcohol and some of the water evaporates out, condensing the sugars. Some chili recipes braise in beer and water. Some classic pork recipes braise in milk. Or, in the South—Coca-Cola.

  I try them all. Pot roasts become my go-to weekend dish. I have a free Sunday afternoon? Pot roast. No plans for dinner? Pot roast. Extra-long commercial break? You bet that’s a pot roast. Solid experimental proof of the Higgs boson? Pot. Roast.

  One fine Saturday evening, my wife is invited to a Drag Queen Tupperware Party. This is, I’m told, a Tupperware party hosted by a drag queen—and not, as I initially supposed, an opportunity to ensure that one’s drag queen remains refrigerator fresh. With Summer in Eagle Rock catching dinner storage and a show, I’m staying home with Declan. Just the two of us. Guys’ night.

  It’s the first night Declan and I have had alone together for quite a while. I’m usually running hither and yon, pulled in a thousand different directions, working on a million different things. Dec is usually getting ready for bed by the time I get home. But not tonight. Tonight we can do anything we want.

  And guys gotta eat.

  Declan is almost two years old. A few times while I was cooking, he’s brought a chair over and tried to help. I gave him some carrots to “hold for me,” as there was never really anything he could actually do to pitch in. But tonight, that changes. Tonight, Daddy and Dec have a mission. Tonight, we’re making stew. Appropriate for the evening, as a stew is just a pot roast in a wig. More liquid than a braise, but the same process underneath. Moisture. Low heat. Long time.