Year of the Cow (9 page)

16.
Butter the hamburger buns. Don't be shy: Spread the butter to the very edge of the bun—it'll help them brown evenly. Drop the buns, butter side down, onto the griddle or grill for a few minutes, until they've reached the appropriate level of toasted Maillard-y glory.

Badass move: Brand your buns. Straighten out a plain wire coat hanger. Remove any and all nonmetal pieces from the hanger and fold the end into either the shape of your initial or that of your guest. Then bend the wire 90 degrees (needle-nose pliers help), so that the letter is perpendicular to the rest of the wire's length. You've just created a branding iron. Stash it in a 400°F oven for 20 minutes, or until hot. Be careful. Using oven gloves (duh), remove your branding iron and brand the top half of each bun.

17.
Take a deep breath. You're about to eat. Bring out all the toppings and accoutrements from hiding and get ready to assemble the burger.

18.
First place the bottom half of a bun in the center of a large plate. On top of this bun, smear some umami ketchup and then place a beef patty. Next comes the Parmesan crisp, a few mushrooms, a few tomato halves, and some onion. Place the top half of the bun on top, being careful not to press down.

19.
Serve, enjoy, and bask in richly deserved adulation.

 

4

New Heights

When the weekend rolls around, I have a project. I'm prepping for an ascent up Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the contiguous forty-eight states. I can't wait. It's easily the most extensive expedition I've ever participated in. We'll start at the trailhead, Whitney Portal, at elevation 8,500 feet. Then we simply have to walk uphill for ten miles, until we hit elevation 14,505 feet, and there's no more uphill to walk. I need to be ready.

In this case, ready means well provisioned. To that end, I'm making jerky. I've never done it before, but I have a recipe that seems dummy-proof, and dummy-proof is key. This isn't food I'm eating at home; this is food I'm taking up a mountain. If I mess it up, there's no supermarket at elevation to fall back on, so I'd rather not mess it up.

Beef jerky is essentially nothing more than beef, dried and seasoned to make it both lightweight and inhospitable to bacteria. Lightweight is good, because I'm going to be carrying it on my back a very long way. Inhospitable to bacteria means it won't go bad quickly, and I won't become explosively ill when I eat it. I've been explosively ill, and I can't say I recommend it.

In the jerky approach I'm using, the beef is first marinated in an acidic, salty liquid that hopefully tastes good. As you may recall from biology class, cells bring liquid through the cell membrane through a process of osmosis. Weirdly enough, that process is a passive one—it doesn't depend on blood flow or respiration or any other biological activity. When cells are immersed in liquid, cell membranes want to equalize the salinity of the liquid on either side of the membrane. So if one were to slice beef ridiculously thin, exposing a lot of cell membranes, and then submerge that beef in a delicious salty liquid, the cell membranes would draw said liquid into the meat, in essence seasoning the meat from the inside.

One great cut for jerky is flank steak. It's about the right size, is low in fat, and has a big, pronounced grain structure for easy slicing. That's clutch. Muscles are basically bundles of extremely thin cord that shrink as they dry. If I slice this piece laterally across those cords, the meat will fall apart as the meat dries into jerky. Like lace. The reason flank steak is so good for jerky is that you can slice
along
those long cords, keeping them intact. This will result in a long stick of relatively intact jerky, rather than a crusty meat doily.

Flank steak primarily comprises the abdominal muscles of the cow, off the belly, in front of the back legs. The problem is, I have a single cow. And that cow has only so much flank steak, which is good for lots and lots of preparations. Due to its scarcity, I'm not entirely sure I want to sacrifice any of it to make jerky.

Most butchers use top round for jerky. It's similarly low-fat, can be cut to the right size, and, if I slice with the grain, can be cut molecule-thin. I decide that this is the cut for me. Top round comes off the back leg of the animal, and since there are two back legs, I have scads and scads of top round.

The low-fat content of this cut is also key. Fat can go rancid at room temperature simply from exposure to oxygen, which would defeat the main point of making jerky: preservation. The lack of fat also makes cuts from the round primal prone to drying out easily, which is good for me, as drying out some meat is exactly what I'm trying to do.

First things first. I find a top round steak in the two-pound range. As jerky, it'll weigh considerably less, but I figure it should be enough to get me up and down the hill. I pull it from the freezer but don't thaw it all the way. If it's still a little frozen, it will stay firm and slice more easily.

I cut the top round along the grain, slicing it as thin as humanly possible. If a stiff breeze came through, these slices would flutter away. I could read an eye chart through these things.

That done, I prep my marinade. It may be possible to botch a marinade from a flavor standpoint, but from a chemical standpoint they're pretty straightforward. I need to build a salty, acidic liquid that tastes good. Soy sauce, Worcestershire, and red pepper feature prominently. I like the heat.

I stash all the meat in a Ziploc bag and stow it in the fridge. It needs to relax overnight so that the marinade has time to penetrate the meat. It won't penetrate far—despite what you've read, say, everywhere, marinade does not reach deep into the meat. It penetrates the surface of the meat a few millimeters, but no farther. Lucky then that my meat is only the thickness of a sheet of graphene.

So—cool. I have to let the beef marinate overnight, and the rest of my day is unscheduled. Summer has the little man, and they've set out on the town to run some errands. I'm all alone, with time on my hands.

Yep. Nothing on the list.

Nothing at all.

I have a hard time doing nothing. I'm done, now, with the task set before me, and any sane being would rest. But I'm pretty thoroughly conditioned to seek out the next bit of stimulus—the next box to check, the next bullet for boredom, the next activity to slot into my schedule to free me from the impending panic of not being productive.

I fire up the laptop. I'm the nerdiest guy in most rooms, and I've been a gamer since the deep dark wayback of the proto-Internet. So I take this opportunity to rid a fictional sleepy little town of a horde of the slavering undead. This is in no way relaxing, though it does provide the task-oriented part of my cerebral cortex with the illusion of productivity. My sense of accomplishment is real enough, though. However unearned it may be.

The next morning, back in the real world, it's time to get weird. I said this jerky was dummy-proof, and I meant it. The fastest and most efficient way that I could screw this up would be to burn it. I've had burned jerky—it's like chewing a charcoal briquette. Since the jerky is so thin, it'll burn if you so much as give it a come-hither look. Unless you don't use heat.

The approach I'm using comes from culinary guru and
Weird Science
party-scene extra Alton Brown. It involves drying the meat without any heat. Furnace filters. Strapped to a box fan. Set on high. And left alone.

Yeah, let's get weird.

After a quick trip to the hardware store, I'm getting ready to lay tiny slices of beef into the grooves on twenty-by-twenty furnace filters and trying not to wonder if the filters are fiberglass. Let's say they aren't. For safety, these filters should really be made of paper. Their packaging is unclear on the matter.

I'm sure they're paper. They must be paper. Why wouldn't they be paper?

But they really look like fiberglass. I'd prefer not to eat fiberglass.

Finally, caution gets the best of me, and I sandwich paper towels in between the furnace filters so that the beef isn't directly touching the material-that-may-or-may-not-be-fiberglass. I turn the fan on high and walk away.

Eight hours later, I check the protojerky. Still moist.

Ten hours. Still moist.

Twelve. Moist. Also, did I mention that for some reason I did this inside? I did. That was perhaps a mistake. My entire home smells like a smokehouse. I move the box fan outside and plug it back in, wafting meat fumes across the lawn.

Thirteen hours in, there are cats in the yard. The fan comes back inside.

Finally, fifteen hours later, the beef is dry. The furnace filters are beyond ruined, stained brown with marinade and meat juices. But the jerky is done.

I examine a piece of jerky. It's mostly dry and pencil-thin. It didn't maintain a rectangular shape—each piece contracted into a cylinder. They look like little beef ballpoint pens.

I taste a piece. It's lovely. Chewy and spicy, with just a subtle sweetness in the finish. I try another. I could definitely see myself eating this for a long period of time—on a climb up a very tall mountain.

I'll soon get my chance.

*   *   *

I've never climbed a mountain before.

I love the outdoors, and I clamber around in the mountains near my house whenever I have the opportunity, which isn't as often as I'd like. And I love to camp—in the same vague, but-I-never-do-it way that I love attending the symphony or painting with watercolors. Summer, on the other hand, makes no pretense about the woods—she'd rather wander through a downtown than the backcountry and sleep on high thread-count sheets than under the stars.

When the opportunity to climb Mount Whitney presented itself, however, I couldn't say no. It came in an e-mail from my friend Zac. He and his wife, Katie, have been my close friends since high school, and as we've moved around the country in the intervening years, we've weirdly always managed to stay within a two-hour drive of each other. Our families plan vacations together. And somehow, Zac manages to get out into the wilderness a little more than I do. For both of us, this is a tremendous adventure. For me, this is a rare treat.

I'm going in a party of five—an assembly of friends and friends of friends, all hale and hearty and ready for the challenge. I'm by far the weakest link. Zac is the nucleus of the group and the only one who knows everyone. He's a navy physician and the kind of guy who files down the plastic nubs of the playing pieces of board games. He measures the weight of his pack down to the milligram, and he's one of my oldest friends. His buddy Uriah, in addition to having the best name on the planet, is a friend of Zac's from way back. Uriah's a gnome. Five feet six on his tippy toes, with the forearms of someone who both free climbs cliff faces near his Colorado home and also happens to be a recreational blacksmith. Rich is another navy doctor—a genial bear of a man—and an excellent general outdoorsman. He's been up the mountain a half a dozen times, and he knows it well. He's the closest thing we have to a guide. His wife, Natalie, is the only woman on the trip. She's a yoga instructor and prone to breaking into spontaneous handstands. Then there's me. My expertise is mainly limited to bad jokes and trivia questions.

Of the five of us, two are practicing military physicians with experience in emergency medicine; one is a skilled technical climber, acclimatized to high altitude; one is a fitness professional in peak physical condition; and one has an unproduced screenplay about fairies.

Mount Whitney is one of the most accessible high peaks in the United States. The path to the summit ascends very gradually. It's a wide, well-tended twenty-two-mile trail that meanders along a route especially chosen to be accessible to hikers of all fitness levels, with permanent handholds installed for any potentially tricky bits.

We aren't going that way.

We're headed up something called the Mountaineer's Route, and it isn't actually a marked trail, though it is a well-known path to the mountain's summit. We will start out on the main Mount Whitney Trail, then veer off the trail at the north fork of a mountain stream called Lone Pine Creek. We'll follow this creek straight uphill about eight miles, rather than pussyfooting around the perimeter of the range. This route is shorter and harder and has a lot more exposure (i.e., chances to fall a very long way). It's the route that John Muir took to what was then the roof of the country, and it's a classic of American mountaineering.

Zac, Uriah, and I carpool from my place up to Whitney Portal. It's a remarkable drive. North of Los Angeles, the suburbs and lush green lawns fall away as the road drops out of the San Gabriel Mountains and into the Mojave Desert. Water is scarce, and Joshua trees claw the impossibly blue sky like dessicated hands. As we drive north, the High Sierras rise out of nowhere, ten miles or so to our left. Among them, the highest point in the contiguous United States. To our right, just over the horizon, Death Valley, and the lowest point. It's a climate of extremes.