Duba and Company Terroir of Beef
In the Spring of 2000, having just moved to Denver from the pocket-size mountain hamlet of Pour, CO, and thinking that I would exist in Colorado some other iii to six months before moving back to One thousand Rapids (I had been away from home for over four years now), I took my first job serving tables. The California Cafe was a fine dining eating place that, besides wanting its applicants to have had 2 years of fine dining experience, desired for its servers to accept an extensive noesis of wine (they had a truly impressive cellar of California wines). Now, non only had I never served before but the extent of my wine knowledge included (1) that wine is fabricated from grapes, and (ii) that there were two types: white and scarlet. And and then the first thing I did afterward talking the general managing director into giving me a job (which, two weeks later, she would end up regretting) was to head direct to Barnes & Nobel for my first primer on the discipline: Wine for Dummies.
Among the outset things I learned from the sage tome what that wines are oftern named (certainly in the U.s.a.) according to the grape multifariousness used to make the wine; these are called varietals (examples of varietals include Chardonny, Pinot Grigio, Pinot Noir, and Cabernet Savignon). But I as well quickly came across a term associated with wine civilization (terroir) that is as difficult for me to pronounce every bit is the discussion rural. The idea backside terroir is that you can taste geography (e.yard. climate, soil, herbage) in the food that originates from that geography. Now this was a actually fascinating concept to me. The first time this concept actually became a reality was during a couple of Scotch tastings. In the Islay Scotchs one could literally taste the common salt air in the stuff; Scotch from other regions tasted "peaty": earthy, mossy. Pretty cool.
Could terroir apply in the same ways to beefiness as it does to wine and Scotch? You bet! While there is more than than ane factor that affects the "flavour contour" of beef, among the well-nigh important is the geography in which the cattle are raised. Right here a distinction needs to exist fabricated between "conventional beef" (grain-fed–usually corn-fed–cattle, finished by the tens of thousands in feedlots) and "grass-fed beef", cattle whose diets are primarily forage-based (think wild grasses and herbs) and which are raised in small herds on family farms. While it may be presumed that conventional beefiness has a mild, more often than not uniform "beefy" flavour due to the cattle'due south homogenous nutrition of corn-flakes, where things get really interesting is in beef from grass-fed cattle. Cheers to the very small number of farmers returning to traditional ways of raising cattle on their native diets, we can now begin to speak of the terroir of beef–how the land on which cattle are raised gets translated into the flavor of the beef from that cattle. Of the beef that comes from that cattle, not simply do we get more flavor, but more than flavor variety.
For starters nosotros get to ask farmers, "On what unique forage does your cattle graze?" The answers could include any number of unique grasses, clover, nettle, dandelion, willow, etc. All that gets translated into the flavor contour of the beefiness that is provided by that cattle. Furthermore, we go to ask, "In what kind of soil does the forage grow on which the cattle graze?" This is another important question for that which is present in the soil gets translated into the foliage which grows in the soil which gets eaten by the cattle which gets translated into the flavors present in the beef. Concluding calendar week, in speaking with some farmers from Georgia, they suggested that meat from grass-fed cattle from the Eastern United States includes a distinct mineral flavor because of the high mineral content of the soil from the Appalachian Mountains. What all this means is that nosotros tin begin to speak of steak in a similar way that wine enthusiasts speak of wine or Scotch lovers speak of Scotch. We can be near the business of keeping journals of the beef we've tried–total of flavor, total of diversity–in the same way that cigar aficionados do.
Source: https://dubasteaksblog.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/the-terroir-of-beef/