It’s a pretty audacious move to try and cook a fifty dollar steak for yourself. It’s not something I thought I would ever trust myself to do (although I learned how to pan-fry steak on a selection of very nice Omaha filet mignons that my elderly grandmother’s elderly boyfriend used to have shipped to her regularly and which she never ate). 

I’ve eaten vegan. I’ve eaten vegetarian. I’ve eaten only raw food. As it turns out, I am a person who sometimes eats meat. Quality over quantity - no one needs to eat meat every day. No one needs to eat more than two or three ounces of meat at one meal. But if you’re going to eat animal flesh, I believe, given the options for meat and poultry available in this country, it ought to be steak. And if you’re going to eat steak, it ought to be a good one.

The emblematic nature of steak in America’s diet has always somewhat mystified me. As Kurt Vonnegut put it,

Being American is to eat a lot of beef steak, and boy, we’ve got a lot more beef steak than any other country, and that’s why you ought to be glad you’re an American. And people have started looking at these big hunks of bloody meat on their plates, you know, and wondering what on earth they think they’re doing.

I have memories of eating delicious steaks at upscale restaurants as a kid, but I never thought of it as THE food, or even THE meat (to be honest, that place in my heart was reserved for bacon). That changed when I read Mark Schatzker’s Steak, a food-travelogue encompassing the question of why, if Americans love steak so much, we eat so much of it that doesn’t taste particularly good. After steaksplorations of four continents, Schatzker ends the book in Idaho, on the family-owned and operated Alderspring Ranch, where Glenn and Caryl Elzinga create slow-raised, truly free range and organic grassfed beef. Depending on your knowledge of where and how nearly all American meat is sourced, you may realize that Alderspring’s slow food method is an incredibly unique way of processing beef these days. 

But you’re not paying fifty dollars for a concept or a certificate of authenticity. Of the Alderspring steak, Schatzker writes,

I would like to tell you how that steak tasted, but the truth is, we lack an adequate meat vocabulary. …My mouth wasn’t in the mood to form syllables. It wanted to chew. I let it. What I can tell you about that steak is how it made me feel. The flavor reached deep into my subcortex and uncorked a sensation that bubbled up and drowned out every other thought, concern, and anxiety…The feeling is joy.

It’s difficult to write about food, so we won’t pick at Schatzker here. On the recommendation of this soliloquy, we ordered two rib-eyes to find out if the meat was as life-changing and joy-inducing as advertised. It was. The major point worth making is that a steak of this quality, raised under the right circumstances, is practically an entirely different food from what you are used to putting in your mouth. Even inside the plastic, it is a different color and texture than supermarket steak. It was darker red than any of my pictures can attest to. Blood dripped out, enough that the meat had to be paper-toweled dry before cooking. The steak itself felt different, heavier, sort of, denser but also softer and more pliable. I held it for a while, as Schatzker instructs every cook to do, “trying to memorize the suppleness of the flesh.” I didn’t quite let it warm to room temperature: mistake #1. We decided to fully cook one of the rib-eyes first, then the next, to maximize our not-screwing-up potential. 

I pan-fried the first steak in a clean, dry stainless steel pan, over high heat turned down halfway through to medium. You only get one chance to flip a steak, according to Schatzker. I like my meat on the less-cooked end of the medium rare spectrum, so I plated the first steak after only about four minutes per side. I scraped a few browned bits left in the pan and we had our first taste of The Best Steak in America. The first word that came to each of us was “butter.”

After resting two minutes, I cut into the steak. It was pretty seriously rare. It was also pretty seriously delicious - not only the flavor but the density of the flavor concentration in the meat was incredible. I hadn’t salted this one before cooking it - mistake #2. I wanted to experience the meat completely on its own, but salt before cooking really can’t be overrated. We salted the second one (having to flip it twice! Mistake #3!) and cooked it nearly twice as long, trying to land exactly on medium rare. Meanwhile, I decided to break the cardinal rule of cooking and put the first steak back in the pan. I like rare, but honestly this was bordering on tartare.

Four broken steak rules later, we were eating. And it was amazing. About a third of the way through, we gave up on utensils, trading this bite looks like a really juicy one for wait you have to have this really crispy part. We barely spoke beyond that. Our eyes were closed half the time. It occurred to me at one point how glad I was that I wasn’t at a five-star restaurant, that I was eating the best steak of my life with my hands and my teeth, with no witnesses. I hadn’t even bothered with potatoes - we ate the steak alone, with just a little sauteed spinach and garlic and a sliced tomato and onion salad (to be honest, once I really got into the meat, I didn’t even touch my vegetables). I didn’t get that sick-full feeling that even delicious steak usually leaves me with. This sat differently in our stomachs, fulfilling but not overly filling. It’s very rare for a meal to leave me actually satisfied. This one did.