The Art of Buying Good Steak

Travel and food writer Mark Schatzker has a new book coming out called Steak: One Man's Search for the World's Tastiest Piece of Meat.

Providing a preview of the book in the Wall Street Journal, Schatzker complained, "All anyone seems to know about steak today is this: It doesn't have much flavor. The great American steak is great in name only."

To get a great steak, Schatzker says, you have to know three things: 

• How old was the cow when slaughtered? (It should be at least 20 months.)
• How much did it weigh? (It should weigh more than 1,000 pounds.)
• What breed is it? (It is not good if it is Charolais or Limousin. You want Hereford, Galloway or Angus unless you are very rich and can buy grass-fed Wagyu.)

With the peak-grilling season about to get underway, I decided to take Mr. Schatzker's questions to the butchers in our local supermarkets. I had an idea they might laugh, and they did.

"The company takes care of all that," the butcher on duty at the Stop & Shop on Franklin Avenue said, smiling and confessing he had no idea how old the cow was or what it weighed.

"Those days are long gone," a butcher at Whole Foods explained. "These days all we get are primal cuts."

It turns out that a primal cut is a whole leg or a whole rib or some other part of a cow that comes to the store neatly sealed in plastic. Butchers never see whole carcasses anymore. They use primal cuts to cut the steaks, roasts, chops, etc. that we see in the meat case.

But the helpful butcher at Whole Foods was able to provide answers to some of Schatzker's questions. He showed me a primal cut that was marked Angus, and said most of the beef they got came from Angus cows that were about two-years old.

But he too had no idea how much any cow weighed when it was slaughtered to make the steaks I was about to buy. He also showed me some grass-fed beef that had much less marbling, but he assured me it was still tenderer than well-marbled beef from cows raised on a vegetarian diet. It was also more expensive.

In talking to the butcher, I also learned that most veal comes from male calves born to dairy cows. If the veal is redder than usual, it was from some other breed.

At Whole Foods, almost all the beef comes from farms in the Northeast, and they are listed on a chalkboard on the counter. The beef marked "local" comes from farms within 300 miles of the store.

You can also buy Whole Foods aged beef that has been kept in a special cooler with constant humidity for about 30 days. Not being a meat connoisseur, I've always been put off by the price of aged beef—though my husband assures me it is terrific.

After my lesson at Whole Foods, it was clear to me that Mr. Schatzker doesn't buy his steak from a supermarket chain. He advises readers to shop online or comb farmers' markets to find flavorful steaks.

But the strip steaks I bought at Whole Foods for $13.99 a pound tasted quite good to us. That's not to say Schatzker's book wouldn't be an interesting read. You can get a copy at Amazon for less than I paid for the steaks.

"Grocery Shop with Gloria" is a weekly column on the local food-shopping scene, written by resident Gloria Johnson.