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The Independent (London)
Saturday 3 Jun, 2006

In search of the perfect steak

Forget pepper sauces, truffles, foie gras, cheese. A good steak should be cooked naked, as God intended. Surely, then, it can't be that hard to find 10oz of sheer meaty perfection? John Walsh goes on an epic quest.

Go to Buen Ayre's review>>

Percy Shelley and my mother would have seen eye to eye on the subject of steaks. Neither was keen on nakedness in the kitchen. Shelley felt that the sight of raw meat should make us faint with abhorrence: "It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation," he wrote, "that it is rendered susceptible of mastication and digestion, and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust."

How familiar that sentiment is. I grew up in an Irish carnivorous household, where the Sunday roast beef, well done and smothered in gravy, was routinely praised as "beautiful", but where an unclothed steak was considered gross, like a naked man who'd lain out for too long in the sun. My mother never served a steak to any of the visiting priests she fed over two decades without up-ending a jar of Cook-In Sauce over the charred, tragic lump in the frying-pan.

In my first visits to fancy restaurants, steaks were never called steaks and never left alone. They had French names and stuff on top. They were tournedos Rossini, an extravagant dish with foie gras, black truffles and Madeira f wine fighting for the upper hand. They were entrecôtes Bordelaises, lying defeated under a slurry of sauce espagnole and red Bordeaux. In the steak dishes of the 1960s and 1970s, chefs could skimp on the quality of the meat because of the pains they took to camouflage it with sauce or cheese or ratatouille. While still young, I wondered why the meat lying under all this random garnish could be sometimes delicious and sometimes a nightmare of fat, fibre and gristle. By the 1990s, I was wondering the same thing, as I digested yet another indifferently cooked, flavourless, unyielding, eight-ounce sirloin in a mushroom or (no, most likely and) peppercorn sauce, in yet another pub dining-room off the M3.

About 10 years ago, I resolved to stick henceforth to the naked steak as the food mankind was put on earth to eat. I'm not alone. There are almost as many steak purists around today as there are dry martini purists. The latter won't let you put anything more into the gin than the tiniest suspicion of vermouth and maybe a dribble of olive juice. The former throw their hands up in horror at any thought of messing about with Just the Steak Itself - any hint of marinading it (à la niçoise), of slicing it up (tagliata), cutting it into strips (stroganoff), casseroling it in chunks (à la bourguignonne) or smothering it with goat's cheese (à la capricorn). For God's sake we cry, in unison. Can we try to remember the word comes from the Old Norse steikjo, meaning "to roast on a spit"? Every steak needs just a naked flame or some glowing coals to make it work properly. It's a crime to offer a meat-lover a mucked-about, cut-up, de-natured, sauced-up version of that classic burnt sacrifice.

Steaks are Holy Communion for carnivores. They combine earthiness and sophistication in a perfect package. They have a dark, intense texture that you just don't get with pork and lamb. They're both savoury and juicy, as few other things are. They're often redolent of blood and ashes, the essence of mankind, alive and dead. More prosaically, they give you instant energy and stamina. They're the dish of choice for professional chefs at the end of an exhausting shift. They're the lunch of champions. When I interviewed Daniel Barenboim in Bayreuth, a few years ago, just before he went into the orchestra pit to conduct Tristan und Isolde for four hours, I longed to discover what the maestro ate for his lunch at such a pressured time. What else but steak, chips and salad?

Earlier this year, I named my New Year resolution: to find the Perfect Steak. I explained how I'd tried many of the new red-meat eateries that opened after the six-year Euro-ban on steak on the bone was lifted in 2002 and found that, by and large, they didn't offer that unearthly succulence, that coarse-grained but simultaneously melting-on-your-tongue sexy juiciness that we've all experienced in the past but mostly forgotten. So I set out to find it, whether in a restaurant or at home.

Between visiting restaurants, I boned up, if that's the word, on steak husbandry. I learnt there's more to it than buying a lump of beef in Waitrose and throwing it on a grill. So much must be taken into account - like where the beast comes from, the cut you choose, the amount of time the steak is aged in a cold larder or fridge, the nature of its preparation, and the method of cooking.

The Provenance. Only a madman would use anything but British or Irish beef. Lovers of Argentinian meat may like to know that most of it originated over here. The cattle roaming the pampas today derive from Hereford and Aberdeen Angus cattle, brought over from the Isle of Harris in 1825. You need to be sure that the animal was grass- and grain-fed, and was two years old when slaughtered. Or you can just rely on the quality control assurances from government agencies. Check with Eblex (the English Beef and Lamb Executive) at beefyandlamby.co.uk to find a good stockist. I clicked on "London" and found there are only 16 butchers in the metropolis who hold a QSM (Quality Standard Meat) rating. I was pleased to note that one is my local, the sublime William Rose Ltd in Lordship Lane, East Dulwich.

The Cut. Meat is just muscle, cut from the place where the animal's ribs join its backbone, between shoulder and the hips. The tenderness of a cut depends on how active the joint was during the animal's life. Fillet yields the leanest and tenderest meat. It's the most well-groomed-looking cut, used whole in beef Wellington (or boeuf en croûte as the French insist in calling it). Slicing from the thick end, you get the heavenly chateaubriand (for sharing between several people); from the middle come the roundels of tournedos; and down at the narrow end is that favourite of posh Americans, the filet mignon. The sirloin, as the name suggests, is the upper part of the loin; it must be removed from the bone and cut into slices. Firm-textured and less tender than the fillet, it has bags of flavour. In decreasing order of size, sirloins give the hungry diner the thick-cut, dead macho porterhouse, the T-bone (cut from the chump end, it has both sirloin and fillet steak attached), the entrecôte (which means literally "between the ribs"), and the runtish minute steak. Some way down the hierarchy of loveliness comes the rump or "H-bone", a big, chewy steak somewhat tough on the incisors. And the rib-eye is a big hefty object sliced off the rib-bone and usually carrying a hefty marbling of fat (which makes it delicious).

The Ageing Process. In his magisterial On Food and Cooking (the book that also inspired Heston Blumenthal, see page 12), Harold McGee writes: "Like cheese and wine, meat benefits from a certain period of 'ageing', or slow chemical change, before it is consumed. Its flavour improves and it gets more tender. Exactly what happens during ageing is not known, but the general impression is that the muscle's own enzymes are the principal agents." So now you (don't) know. If stored between 1 and 3 degrees celsius, steaks will improve over 10 to 21 days.

The Cooking. Use a griddle pan and turn the heat up high from the start. Don't put olive oil in the pan, or it will burn and smoke. Better to coat the steak with oil on both sides on a shallow plate. Make sure the pan is scorchingly hot before you slam the meat down on it. For a standard-size sirloin steak, one inch thick, three minutes a side should be plenty for medium-rare. Turn the steak over only once (it's the Argentine way) and, when you take it off the heat, let it rest for a few minutes on a warm surface covered by a piece of foil.

That's the theory. But how does the modern steak work out in practice?

I visited some new, and some tried and tested, restaurants. La Pampa, located in Battersea on the street where I grew up, is kitschy and ramshackle, and the service arrogantly disdainful, to a degree that must, you feel, be authentically Argentinian. Ignore the over-priced starters (which are just vegetable dishes, served early) and go for the steaks - rump, fillet or striploin (US for sirloin) with an optional two fried eggs on the top. I've eaten here many times, always with enjoyment (and always with eggs, an inspired refinement). The medium-rare 9oz rump was large but disappointingly thin and coarse at the edges.

The 9oz double-fillet was thick as a Bible and fabulously tender, if a touch dry. A chimichurri relish on the side was the only let-down, a hellishly vinegary concoction you wouldn't use to clear your drains. Seven out of 10.

Some sirloin connoisseurs at the next table recommended a place in Hammersmith where "they're really hardcore about steaks", so I seized a serious carnivore pal and rushed there. The Popeseye (it's what they call rump in Scotland, apparently) is a simply decorated room with one man presiding over a black griddle, and its menu is admirably brisk. It virtually says, if you're not after a juicy steak, you can bugger off. The steaks, in the usual cuts, are to die for - partly because their size could bring on a cardiac arrest. They range from a puny 6oz fillet to a 30oz sirloin, costing £45. With the main event comes a big wooden tray of mustards and relishes, a joy to behold. My 12oz sirloin was a symphony of rough-textured, pink-hearted meaty bliss, though its juices rather dried up halfway through. None the less, 8 out of 10.

If one restaurant chain has altered the way we think about steak, it's the Gaucho Grill. I've been a couple of dozen times, admired their meat-themed interiors (the bar stools are lined with Friesian cowskin) and gorged on their much-vaunted Argentine Steaks. I always have the Bife Ancho, namely the rib-eye, described on the menu as "a marbled sirloin with a rich centre and a tender skirt" which makes no sense, since every bit of it is rich and tender. Their house speciality at present is the £20 Churrasco de Lomo, which is a marinaded fillet cut in a spiral - heretical conduct with a fillet, but allegedly found delicious by impressionable girls. I stick to the rib-eye, while noting that its tenderness is not always matched by very complex flavours. 8 out of 10.

Worth a detour is Sophie's Steakhouse in Fulham, located across the road from the Fulham omniplex cinema, and named after co-founder Sophie Mogford, the daughter of Jeremy Mogford, the man behind the Browns chain. With its stripped-down décor, brick walls and bare lightbulbs it's a cunning simulacrum of a Chicago steakhouse. They used to feature only ribeye, fillet and contrefilet (the French name for sirloin) with Béarnaise or Sophie's Steak Sauce. Now they've gone for the speciality market. This is one of the few steak outlets that'll do you a 15oz chateaubriand (for two sharing at £29.95), a whopping 27oz porterhouse (£34.95) and a 24oz côte de boeuf served on the bone (£27.95). All steaks are individually selected from Scots and Ulster farms and aged for 28 days. You can't book tables, and it gets terribly crowded but you won't mind when the steaks are this lusciously proportioned and scrumptious. 8 out of 10.

For years I'd been told about Smith's of Smithfield as the earthly paradise of the steak-minded. It's a huge, three-storey edifice beside the old meat market - the elaborate frontage looks across the road to the market stalls where the hosed-down blood is pooling among the cobbles. The ground floor of Smith's is a bar off-puttingly full of shrieky young City types. The first floor is a so-so restaurant spread out on four sides of a square. The second floor is devoted to "fine dining" and is hushed as if about to start Mass. On a menu that's already pretty steep, you locate the "Fine Meats" section, and gasp. A 10oz South Devon rump steak costs £25.50, while a Welsh Black Sirloin will set you back £28.50. The management specify that all fine meats have been hung for 22 or 24 days (why so precise?) and you're given a potted biography of the animal whose lower back you're chewing. I was so awestruck by the experience, I didn't register much about the steak except that it arrived cooked medium rather than medium-rare. I was too intimidated by the expense to send it back. It was densely flavoured and obscurely sexy, if a little chewy for my liking. This is a crucial destination for the serious connoisseur. 81/2 out of 10.

The end of my quest took me to deepest Hackney in search of the legendary Santa Maria Del Buen Ayre, the first authentic Argentine grill-restaurant in the country. It's a small, crowded, friendly local eaterie with minimal décor, a buzzy atmosphere and a heady pong of garlic and hot basil. Gen-u-ine Argentinians do that thing with tequila, salt and lemon while fantastic steaks are turned on a parilla over hot coals by chef and co-owner John Patrick Rattagan. Starters are negligible, salads insultingly prosaic (tomato and onion salad is a tomato and onion, quartered) but the steaks are sublime. They taste as if they've just come off the barbecue (which is exactly where they have just come from). My bife ancho con morrones y guarnicion was a lovely round 11oz ribeye, nicely accessorised by fat, seared to an almost-burn at the edges, crimson as sin inside. My companion's bife de lomo (8oz fillet) was a sexy, thick tranche that melted and swooned away at the touch of a knife. The meat is brought from Argentina by boat, hanging for 20-plus days "and, crucially, it's never frozen". The accompanying house chimichurri (oil, thyme, chilli, garlic and red wine) has a pungent kick to it. Avoid the speciality chips with garlic and parsley, which are horrible, but do have a bottle of Norton Malbec (£15) which goes perfectly with the parilla meat. 9 out of 10.

It was quite an odyssey, trying all this seared meat, this mountain of chips, this lake of bloody juice. But I had put my new-found knowledge to the test. I went to my local butcher, William Rose, and asked for a porterhouse steak, two inches thick, 10 ounces in weight. Where did it come from? "Scotland (Orkney Meats and Scotch Premier)." How long had it been aged? "Twenty-one days is ideal - any more is unnecessary." How much is it? "They're about £5.50 each for 10oz." And I took it home, fired up the griddle pan for five minutes, put on a pan of new potatoes, slathered the steak in olive oil, a twist of pepper and some flakes of sea salt and slapped it on the griddle for two-and-a-half minutes each side. The pink sides remained pink as the brown sear-marks from top and bottom began to encroach on it. I whipped it off the pan a whole minute before I should have, left it to rest while I drained and buttered the potatoes, then ate it greedily, as its pink insides seemed to melt in the heat and the juiciness, and the charred exterior nuzzled my tongue. It was the most utterly blissful experience I've ever had with meat. How embarrassing, after all these endeavours, to give oneself 10 out of 10. It's not vanity, though. Just a tribute to the butcher, the Scottish meat industry, and the absolute simplicity (whatever Shelley's distaste) of our relationship with this most appealing of all carnivore treats.

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