Year of the Cow (8 page)

But the immigrants living in the great American cities, perhaps working in those meatpacking plants, and possibly eating beef for the first time in their lives, weren't necessarily eating steak as we know it today. If they were poor, they probably were eating something that we would consider more akin to a meatball: chopped beef odds and ends, likely served with caramelized onions or other filler and eaten with a knife and fork. They were likely eating something called the Hamburg steak.

Of uncertain provenance—some claim it came from Hamburg, Germany, others say it has an English origin—the Hamburg steak appeared in New York restaurants as far back as 1837. Regardless of where it originated, the Hamburg steak found a welcome home in the United States. It was a cheap, filling meal for workers on the go, and because the cuts it utilized were so inexpensive, it could sustain a reasonable profit margin for restaurants. At this point, however, it still required a knife, a fork, and a plate.

There are conflicting accounts regarding the first person to serve this meatball between two slices of bread. Various restaurants and culinary entrepreneurs all claim to have been the first to toast some bread or a bun and slide something like a Hamburg steak between them. Regardless of who had the initial idea, there's no debate about who first took the idea wide.

White Castle was founded in Wichita, Kansas, in 1921. We have them to thank for several innovations crucial to the transformation of the Hamburg steak into the hamburger that we know today. Among them: flattening the hamburger into a patty from a spherical shape and serving it on a special bun intended to showcase it. The first innovation allowed the Maillard reaction (aka “browning”) to take place along a greater surface area of the meat, resulting in a golden-brown and delicious crust paired with a rarer, juicy interior. The latter invention, the bun, was toasted on the griddle alongside the patty, developing its own layer of golden-brown deliciousness—a layer that the meat juices would not soak through as quickly as they would a plain slice of bread. These developments together made the hamburger portable and largely gave rise to the sandwich we're familiar with today.

White Castle expanded rapidly, establishing 116 restaurants by 1930. They did so by relying on standardization and uniformity to mollify a nation still spooked by the revelations of
The Jungle.
White Castle's restaurants were white and airy, to reassure patrons of the facility's cleanliness. The company implemented (and extensively advertised) a set of protocols called “the White Castle System” to assure the public that every White Castle was absolutely identical to every other White Castle on the planet. Restaurant operators received specific instruction in every aspect of daily business, from building construction (prefab, to ensure uniformity), to cooking procedures, menus, napkins, and the smallest detail of employee dress.

White Castle enjoyed moderate success, and its formula for clean, identical hamburgers was widely copied. In 1948, however, the hamburger business would change forever.

It is upon White Castle's foundation that Richard and Maurice McDonald built their hamburger restaurant in San Bernardino, California. They co-opted the atmosphere of cleanliness and dependability but streamlined the operation to eliminate every process that made the business of moving hamburgers out the door less efficient. They slimmed down the menu to seven items. Eliminated all flatware and dishes—everything became disposable. No carhops or waitstaff; everyone ordered at a counter or a drive-through window. They mechanized every aspect of the operation, down to holding the hamburgers at service temperature under a heat lamp, so that they would be ready the instant a customer ordered them. It is this process that so impressed Ray Kroc that he joined the organization in 1954 with an eye toward founding an empire.

Entire books can and have been written about the McDonald's story. But the meat of the matter is this: Kroc was able to take a process that was already largely mechanized and standardized—namely, the making and selling of hamburgers—and spread it with a genius and an aggression that would make Napoleon blush. The result? Visit any highway off-ramp in the country. Odds are there's a McDonald's very close by.

White Castle, and then McDonald's, was able to take something unique to the American experience—plentiful, readily available beef—and make it ubiquitous. Cheaper, faster, and—notable for an era of primarily mom-and-pop restaurants—of a uniform, dependable quality.

Far from the horrors of
The Jungle,
the fast food hamburger became merely another product of American innovation in the atomic age. Another modern convenience, rather than something base and dirty like an actual animal.

Though fast food titans had plenty of animals to work with, thanks to developments in chemical engineering. At the conclusion of World War II, the United States found itself in possession of enormous quantities of surplus ammonium nitrate, with plenty of capacity to make more. This chemical has two major uses: as an oxidizer for explosives (it was built for the war effort) and as a precursor of nitrogen fertilizer. Corn is one of the most nitrogen-hungry crops on the planet, and nitrogen fertilizer can boost per-acre yield tremendously. As a result of munitions manufacture for the war, America now found itself awash in cheap corn. By and large, this surplus corn was fed to cattle. The feedlot system, originally developed in Chicago in the 1870s, meshed seamlessly with this postwar agricultural boom.

Because of the feedlot system, by the 1950s Americans had a nearly unlimited supply of beef. However, instead of being raised entirely or mostly on grass, cattle were being shipped to feedlots and quickly brought to market weight on cheap corn.

The entire process, however, begins with the manufacture of nitrogen fertilizer. To do that, one needs petroleum—the raw material needed to sustain the reaction that produces ammonium nitrate. This reaction, through the manufacture of fertilizer, turns petroleum into produce, specifically corn. And then feedlots turn that corn into beef.

The result of all this innovation is a cheap, uniform product, available anywhere, sold at a low, low price, and distributed through a business model that is almost infinitely scalable. McDonald's alone operates in 119 countries nationwide, with billions and billions of hamburgers sold.

Regardless of its long-ago origin in the Fertile Crescent, beef has become an American icon because, perhaps more than any other country, America literally made beef what it is today. For better or worse, we are largely responsible for its means of production and its means of distribution. Our doctrine of Manifest Destiny gave us the wide-open plains to produce it. We built our national myths around it, rode it hard in the cattle drives, and created a system around it to feed a growing and hungry nation.

In a way, we've succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. The flipside of this system, of course, is that if something is cheap and ubiquitous, we don't value it as much. Behind the mechanization and the drive-through windows, that product was once an animal.

I wanted to unpack the myth of beef and the cultural accoutrements that accompany it. That's why I bought an entire cow. I wanted to really wrap my mind around the idea of this animal that feeds my family, known to me only in its death. I wanted to rescue it from anonymous commodification and see why we eat the way we do. And, perhaps, find out if there's a better alternative.

To some extent, grass-fed beef producers are now rebelling against the mass production of beef—but as a result, grass-fed beef demands a higher price. Similarly, the locavore, farm-to-table, and Slow Food movements are trying to take back mealtime from mass production. In Los Angeles alone, scores of new restaurants are providing information on how and from where they source their food. As consumers, we vote with our dollars for the production methods we prefer.

 

The Best Burger on the Face of the Earth (Seriously)

Time: About 4 hours

Serves 4

Umami Burger, a restaurant that originated in Los Angeles, makes what is in my opinion one of the best burgers on the planet. This is an approximation of their signature sandwich. It isn't the same, but it's close.

To make a good burger, you need good ground beef. You have several options:

(a) Use ground beef from the supermarket. Get 80/20 ground chuck if they have it.

(b) Grind your own. Run 85 percent chuck and 15 percent sirloin through a hand grinder or the grinder attachment on your stand mixer.

(c) Use already ground beef from your meat share or grass-fed steer. This is what I did.

If you'd like to prove yourself a true badass, you can brand the buns. See instructions below.

UMAMI KETCHUP

1 (28-ounce) can whole peeled tomatoes

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 large white onion, diced

½ cup cider vinegar

¹
/
₃
cup packed dark brown sugar

2 tablespoons tomato paste

1 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste

2 teaspoons oyster sauce

2 teaspoons tamari

2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce

5 anchovy fillets, finely chopped and mashed to a paste

CARAMELIZED ONION

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

1 large white onion, sliced

ROASTED TOMATOES

6 plum tomatoes

2 tablespoons olive oil

SHIITAKE MUSHROOMS

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

1 pound shiitake mushrooms, stems removed, finely diced

PARMESAN DISKS

4 ounces Parmesan cheese, shredded

THE BURGER

1 pound ground beef

Kosher salt

4 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened

4 good-quality hamburger buns

TOOLS

Wire coat hanger (optional)

Needle-nose pliers (optional)

The patience of a saint

  
1.
To make the umami ketchup, begin by pureeing the tomatoes in a blender until smooth.

  
2.
Heat the oil in a medium saucepan until shimmery, then add the onion. Cook over medium heat until the onion is soft and slightly translucent but not browned. If you hear sizzling, lower the heat.

  
3.
Pour the pureed tomatoes into the saucepan, along with the vinegar, brown sugar, tomato paste, and salt. Slide this pan to a back burner, uncovered, and leave it alone to simmer gently over low heat for 1 hour. We'll come back to this later to add the rest of the ingredients. Don't let it boil vigorously—it can watch you cook, but it shouldn't comment.

  
4.
To make the caramelized onion, begin by melting the butter over low heat in another skillet (cast iron is nice), then add the onion. Let it cook over low heat, stirring occasionally, for 45 to 60 minutes, until brown, sexy, and wildly caramelized. (Again, if they make noise, turn down the heat.)

  
5.
While the onions are caramelizing, make the roasted tomatoes: Preheat the oven to 325°F.

  
6.
Slice the tomatoes in half lengthwise and lay them cut side up on a baking sheet. Drizzle them with the oil and roast in the oven for 30 to 45 minutes, until they've shriveled and are beginning to caramelize. Be prepared for smoke.

  
7.
Pull the roasted tomatoes from your oven and stash them somewhere out of the way to cool.

  
8.
Knock your oven temp down to 300°F.

  
9.
After 1 hour, remove the pureed tomatoes from the heat of your back burner. Add the oyster sauce, tamari, Worcestershire sauce, and anchovies to the tomato mixture. Puree with an immersion blender until smooth.

10.
Fill a large steel bowl (or sink, or something similar) with icy water to create an ice bath. Stash the ketchup saucepan in the ice bath to cool, making sure the water from the bath remains below the lip of the pan so water doesn't flood in and wreck the ketchup. When the ketchup is at about room temperature, move it to the fridge until ready to serve. (How are those onions from step 4 doing? Don't forget about them.)

11.
To make the shiitake mushrooms, begin by melting the butter in a skillet over low heat (it can be the same one used for the onions if they're done already), then add the mushrooms. Cook over medium heat for about 7 minutes, until the mushrooms are tender. Set aside.

12.
To make the Parmesan disks, begin by folding a piece of aluminum foil into a sturdy strip and wrapping it around the circumference of a hamburger bun. Fold the ends over each other to make a bun-sized circular mold. Line a half sheet pan with parchment paper and drop your aluminum mold on top. Sprinkle the Parmesan into your mold, forming a disk of grated Parmesan the exact diameter of your hamburger bun and about
¹
/
₈
inch thick. Repeat three more times—creating four disks total.

13.
Slip the sheet pan (making sure to keep it level!) into your oven, which should now be at about 300°F. Bake these little disks for about 10 minutes, until just golden and transformed into tiny cheese Frisbees. Set aside. They should still be pliable when you pull them from the oven and will harden as they cool. If your onions are done, pull them from the heat and set aside.

14.
Finally! The beef! Season the meat with a heavy pinch of salt and divide it into four patties, using the same mold you used for your Parmesan crisps for size.

15.
Cook the burgers on (preferably) a cast-iron griddle or a grill over high heat for about 4 minutes per side for medium rare. Under no circumstances should you press down on the burgers with a spatula while they're cooking. It's bad for your soul. When the burgers have finished cooking, set them aside to rest.