Funky Old Cow

[tekobo]

Bizarrely, marmite has a role to play in my access to this beautiful lump of rump.  The restaurant that served us the wonderful marmite butter also served mutton.  My friend's teenage son said the mutton was "life changing" after he had eaten it. I asked the chef for his supplier's name.  And so began a long saga.  The supplier only sold to restaurants and his website said sales were "by invitation only".  I badgered and begged and even threw in a bit of needle by telling him that I regularly buy from one of his main competitors.  Eventually he gave in and has been supplying me with ever more wonderful old sheep for the last couple of years.

When I asked for another sheep a few months ago he sent me a note about a scheme they have going to improve the welfare and sale value of old dairy cows.  Once dairy cows become unproductive they rest and feed them a special diet for a further 7-8 months to get them in tip top condition and then sell the meat at a premium.  Under normal circs I might have thought this was a wheeze to con me out of my money but I had seen the Netflix programme about steak which included the mad Spaniard who specifically breeds bulls/cows to an old age to deliver what they considered to be the best steak in the world.  I was all in.  The supplier managed to persuade me that I didn't need half of a 440kg cow and that I should try a rump first.  Hung for 60 days, the aforesaid rump arrived last week.  

Here it is with most of the mould rubbed off and cut into steaks:

I know the green from the ageing process looks off putting but I tell you, these are some of the best steaks I have ever seen or smelt.  We ate some chopped up raw and had an off cut with chips for lunch yesterday.  Both very very good.  KK action tonight.  Will report back.  

 

 

 

Edited June 2, 2018 by tekobo

[Pequod]

Oh my! This is interesting...

[Bruce Pearson]

Looking forward to the cook. Mouldy meat? I thought mould was bad for you?

[sfdrew28]

Interesting. Following this.


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[MacKenzie]

All eyes are on this.

[tekobo]

3 hours ago, MacKenzie said:

All eyes are on this.

Oooh. It feels like I have put a lot of pressure on a summer's evening steak dinner.  Hope I don't drink too much and forget to take photos at the critical time!  The In-Laws are coming to dinner so you will see the full range from very well done to blue.  

@Bruce Pearson, funny you should remark on the mould.  I had been thinking about it and the outcome of ageing meat.  I was very surprised and impressed by the fact that, after two days in the fridge, absolutely no liquid had leached out of the beef and onto the pink butcher paper that it was wrapped in.  That may be a feature of the fact that the butcher paper allows it to breathe but good nonetheless. When I had that off cut for lunch yesterday the meat was great but I ate very little of the fat because we had not properly trimmed off all the mould.  What I did eat of the "clean" fat reminded me of rancid butter but in a good way.  After all, cheese is rotten milk and blue cheese is mouldy rotten milk and like both.  Proper KK taste test tonight.  

[tekobo]

Ha.  I usually check facts before I post but this time I typed in cheese=rotten milk AFTER I had submitted the last post.  I found this:

"Cheese is not made from "rotten" milk, let me clarify that. Rotting is an uncontrolled process in which bacteria, molds and other life forms colonize milk, eat it, release waste into it and die. The resulting, rather unpredictable, crud we call rotten (or more precisely spoiled) milk.

Most cheese is the product of highly controlled action by bacteria that produce acids that coagulate the casein in the milk. The type of bacteria, the temperature, the amount of time they are allowed to act, the amount of water you drain out of the curdling milk, all control the end result in terms of texture, taste and flavor.

The kicker, though, is that cheese is by no means a sterile product - not even cheese made with pasteurized milk. Bacteria remain inside the cheese, and of course bacteria (and molds and yeasts) land on its surface through its processing and shelf time"

There were lots of people who came on after that to say they were happy that they didn't like cheese and so had less bacteria in their lives.  Poor things, they don't know what they are missing.  Same with the controlled aging of meat.  It has been interesting to stay in touch with people who work to get the balance between ageing and rot just right in a natural product like this.  When they do, it is sublime.  

 

[tony b]

1 hour ago, tekobo said:

There were lots of people who came on after that to say they were happy that they didn't like cheese and so had less bacteria in their lives.  Poor things, they don't know what they are missing.  Same with the controlled aging of meat.  It has been interesting to stay in touch with people who work to get the balance between ageing and rot just right in a natural product like this.  When they do, it is sublime.  

[Tyrus]

Nice.

[tekobo]

The Husband recently received an email about magnums of wine, explaining why they were the better way to store wine in the long term. It included a story about Winston Churchill.  Apparently Churchill said that a magnum was a perfect amount of wine for two gentlemen to share over lunch, particularly if one of them wasn't drinking.  Well this amount of meat was the perfect amount for four people, particularly if two of them are older and don't eat quite so much as they used to.  All trimmed up and ready to go.

We bought two KKs so that we could cook at different temps concurrently and also so that we could get the timing right for serving.  Even so, I often try to sequence things with one KK because I can't quite bring myself to light two KKs at once.  Today I reminded myself that I ought to be true to the cause and bravely lit both at once.  Here are the obligatory veggie shots, this time in the 21"

 

And the now for the meat shots.  I have still never done a reverse sear.  The steaks were only about 1" thick and I wanted most of them rare so there didn't seem to be a need for a reverse sear.  No fat collection mechanism either.  I do like the taste of the smoke from the burnt fat, particularly as it is only from a few minutes of burn.   I am keen, however, to hear if there are other and better ways to do this.  

Done

And yum

Let's hear it for the dairy cows!  This is just another picture of cooked meat but I can assure you that it tasted exceptional.  Not butter soft but with texture and great flavour.  If this takes off it will be a good way of helping to keep dairy farms afloat, alongside promoting the sale of baby male calves for humane rose veal.  

 

 

[Bruce Pearson]

Nice cook looks pretty tasty.

[MacKenzie]

3 hours ago, tekobo said:

 

 

 

 

tekobo, that steak looks awesome, nice grill marks, moist, mouthwatering. 

BTW, I loved the magnum story. 

Edited June 3, 2018 by MacKenzie

[Pequod]

Very inspiring! Now I want a funky old cow. 

There is a local farmer who sells Piedmontese beef at a nearby farmer’s market. I doubt it’s funky, but it is genetically different from usual beef cattle in that it is far more lean, and yet is supposedly very tender and flavorful. These things would seem to be at odds with each other, since we’ve been taught that fat = flavour. I feel an experiment coming on...

[tekobo]

Thank you all.  Especially pleased to hear from you @Tyrus. The meat was yummy.  @Pequod, v interested in the Piedmontese beef.  I find the breed of animal makes the biggest difference to taste.  Ageing amps it up but isn't the be all and end all for me.  Because of the long lead times with aged meat I happen to have a lump of 75 day aged Longhorn arriving this week.  That tastes different again and I think I will cut into 2"+ steaks so that I can try the reverse sear (or even sous vide!) technique.  

[jonj]

As a magnum aficionado, I greatly appreciate the Churchill quote and will shamelessly use it in the future. However, I don't understand how your grill interior can still be so pale after all the cooking you have done. What is going on?

[tekobo]

2 hours ago, jonj said:

As a magnum aficionado, I greatly appreciate the Churchill quote and will shamelessly use it in the future. However, I don't understand how your grill interior can still be so pale after all the cooking you have done. What is going on?

Ha ha.  I do hope the magnum story is not apochryphal.  In any case you can quote it with authority as having come from a Nigerian woman in England!  

Pale interior may be due to high temp pizza cooks?  Keep meaning to find @Syzygies' post about keeping his interior clean with runs at high temps. 

[tony b]

5 hours ago, tekobo said:

I think I will cut into 2"+ steaks so that I can try the reverse sear (or even sous vide!) technique.  

Go for it!!! If you sous vide first, then sear on the KK, you'll kill 2 birds with 1 stone!

[Syzygies]

17 hours ago, tekobo said:

Apparently Churchill said that a magnum was a perfect amount of wine for two gentlemen to share over lunch, particularly if one of them wasn't drinking.

The classic magnum quote is "A difficult size. Too much for one, not enough for two."

Of course, an argon tank renders the question moot: The wine drinks the next day like you just opened it. Shown is a "40" tank, which costs the same as a "20" for refills, but lasts twice as long. Our "20" lasted a year and a half. "Argon" as in "Did you argon the wine, honey?" has become a verb around here.

If one prefers systems vetted by the consumer supply chain, there's always Coravin or other systems. Look at the size of their cartridge, and look again at the size of my tank. Huh. Reminds me of the Thomas Keller recommendation to use 350ml of water for steam, rather than 10ml of water from a plant spritzer. Someone is confused about scale, here, but I don't think it's me.

Edited June 4, 2018 by Syzygies

[Syzygies]

6 hours ago, tekobo said:

Keep meaning to find @Syzygies' post about keeping his interior clean with runs at high temps. 

That's by accident, not by tidy impulse. The KK survives high temps better than other brands, but it's not an ideal habit to get into. For example, I need to replace my main gasket. Was it the high temps? The liberal use of steam as a bread oven? Who knows; I'm not the easiest owner.

[tekobo]

Yet more funky cow in my life.  A week ago two briskets (aged 5 weeks) and one rib of beef (aged 9 weeks) arrived.  The scene was set for impressing my Texan friend with an awesome brisket cook.  

Beautiful rib of beef cut into individual cow chops.  Don't be put off by the mould.  He sent me the end pieces so I could see what the outside of the joint looked like at the end of the aging process.

Here is a nice clean "chop" from the middle of the joint.

I was a little worried when I came to cook the brisket on Sunday morning.  It was only 3.8kg and small compared to the Longhorn brisket (to the right in the photo) that I have cooked in the past.  Decided there was no point into separating into tip and flat in this case. 

Heated my smoke pot up on the stove in the IDK.  I have found this works and doesn't require me to light an extra fire outdoors.

Carefully trimmed the brisket and did the Franklin salt and pepper treatment.

Screwed up the cook by making a change.  I normally cook to 88C internal temp.  When this little baby looked like it was going to cook far too quickly, I throttled the fire AND decided to go up to the 95C internal recommended for "smoking" brisket.  Big mistake.  It looked more like a piece of leather at the end than a juicy brisket.

I panicked and hauled out a couple of cow chops from the freezer.

Cooked them when the guests arrived.  Most said they wanted medium but ended up clearing me out of the rare chop because they loved it so much.  It turned out to be the star of the show, particularly as one of the couples had lived in France for a while and were happy to be having "cote de boeuf" again.

The brisket didn't turn out too bad either.  They all liked it but I know the next one will be so much better.