The Real Beef

One of the great marketing coups of late is to sell the consumer the notion that the term “corn-fed” when it applies to beef means better beef. “Corn/grain fed” is used as a stamp of quality on many menus. But if you stop to consider, you’ll recall that cattle are naturally grass-eaters. So what makes a steak better that comes from an animal that’s eaten a diet it’s not supposed to eat?

The answer lies in commerce. Cattle just take too long to grow to a decent weight if they roam around eating only grass. Corn has the useful effect of fattening the animals up quickly – with the starch and sugars of corn, the cattle gain fast biomass, taking them from a normal 6 month-old to a ready-for-slaughter beast in a year or less. Corn also adds more marbling, or inter-muscular fat to the meat. And corn is cheap and freely available.

But a diet of corn is still unnatural for the animal, and it leads to a host of health problems, for which antibiotics are the only remedy. The modern feedlot is a meat factory that relies on creating a very artificial life, it’s innately none too kind to the animal. In response, there’s an emerging preference for grass-fed beef, from cattle that have been raised on their natural diet – even better, cattle that have led normal pasture-ranging lives.

In one of those ironies, as the world becomes ever-more aware of the problems surrounding the feedlot and “green” issues reach more and more lives, a swathe of restaurants seem to be choosing meat as their signature. Steakhouses are hip again. It appears a natural reaction: as society began to censor smoking, a love affair with cigars lit up again. High fuel prices? Bring on the Hummer.

Cape Town has long had a good few steak dens, some of great longevity, like Wooden Shoe, Nelson’s Eye, Hussar and Buzbey Grill; while Joburg has the famed Butcher Shop and Grill, the Grillhouse and Wombles – but in the last year or so new steak specialists have opened, and it seems that they express a preference for grass-fed as a way to distinguish themselves from the traditional “steak-and-a-side-of-creamed spinach” joints. Places like HQ, Carne SA are the latest; while Belthazar offers less usual cuts and takes great care in ageing their meat. Up north, the Local Grills offer you a choice of grain or grass.

So is the “steakhouse 2.0″ serving much better steaks for being grass- rather than corn-fed? Perhaps. I want to believe in grass-fed, for all kinds of reasons. It would really help, though, if the grass-fed beef really, absolutely tasted better. Perhaps it does, when side-by-side tasted with corn-fed.

But, you see, there is more to a great steak than this factor alone (though it has the allure of virtue). Breed is one. So is how long the meat has matured after slaughter – and whether this was dry- or wet-maturation. But more important than all these factors is the age of the animal at slaughter. In South Africa, our cattle are slaughtered at around 18 months. That’s young meat. As contrast, I tasted a T-bone steak from a 3-year old diary cow at Henri’s that had depth of flavour that the “young” meat at even the best steakhouses lacked, no matter how long the steak had been aged. Older meat is naturally more marbled, and fat is the great carrier of flavour.

The main reason we are obliged to eat young meat is economics (why keep the animal around longer, while costs mount), the other reason is that we have become a nation that prefers tenderness to taste in our meat. Our preference is for fillet ahead of rump ahead of sirloin – and certainly ahead of the much more flavoursome, but often more textured, meat of the rib eye steak, for example. And not to mention all those wonderful cuts that your mom and grandma used to use to create wonderful meat dishes – brisket, shin, etc. Instead, we are besotted with one of the smallest cuts from the animal, from the muscle that works the least in its body and so is the most tender (but has the least taste) – the fillet.

[Parts of this were first published in Wine Magazine, 2009]

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