Get the cardiologist on the line

This cut of beef, pictured above as an integral part of Sunday’s breakfast, is a bit of a mystery. Procured from a Pennsylvania purveyor at the Clark Park Farmer’s Market on Saturday, the “Ranch Steak” is the ideal size for the “steak” half of the classic “steak and eggs” combination. Grass-fed and dry-aged, the steak had a nice degree of marbling. I seasoned it with salt and pepper, cooked it for about five minutes in a pan over medium-high heat, then put it under the broiler to cook the other side, until the steak reached medium rare.

I think this was the optimal method for preparing the steak, and I was certainly pleased with the results. But I wasn’t certain, because the cut of meat is a bit of a mystery. My two most reliable cookbooks for general information, Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything and the 1985 edition of The Joy of Cooking, both provide clear diagrams of a cow and a side of beef, respectively, illustrating the provenance of each individual cut of beef, as well as the preferred method for cooking each cut. But neither book acknowledges the ranch steak. Did I eat some sort of phantom cut of meat? Or does the ranch steak go by a different name?

Luckily, the internet is functioning properly, and Wikipedia also has a nice diagram of a cow. Apparently, I was suckered:

The Ranch steak comes from the chuck cut of a cow, namely the shoulder. Technically it is called a “boneless chuck shoulder center cut steak”, but supermarkets, in an effort to get the patron a better sounding as well as an easier to remember name, dubbed it the “Ranch steak”.

The demands of the market influence small-scale producers too. My local farm evidently followed the lead of the big supermarkets, labeling my “boneless chuck shoulder center cut steak” something more commercially viable.

This labeling also disguised the fact that, at least by the book, the chuck steaks are tough, and best cooked by moist-heat procedures. But my steak, while no filet mignon, was tender enough, both to the knife and my teeth. Maybe this is where the grass-fed beef makes a difference. According to Michael Pollan, grass-fed beef does have less saturated fat and more omega-3 fatty acids than corn-fed beef. And maybe the overall nature of production matters. These cattle were not raised on a massive industrial cattle ranch, but instead on a small farm, where they were presumably pumped less full of drugs and lived a generally more satisfying existence before heading to the abattoir.

All speculation aside, with this particular steak, I will happily flout the advice of the cookbooks and prepare over dry-heat, along with eggs and potatoes, for a lazy weekend breakfast.

I’d be content to eat this seven mornings a week

I’ve only recently admitted New York’s supremacy over Philadelphia in the realm of bagels. For years, a mistaken sense of local pride convinced me that the two were, at the very least, comparable. Too many trips to New York, with mornings featuring bagels from Murray’s and H and H in Manhattan, and most recently Bergen in Brooklyn, must have pounded some objectivity into me.

As a result, I feel little shame about driving fifteen minutes to the edge of the city, at the corner of Haverford and City Line, to a small shopping-center storefront parsimoniously named NY Bagels. While I once might have found such a concession off-putting, I now have no trouble acknowledging that these bagels, even with their foreign title, are the best I’ve had in the region.

Once inside, the bare-bones establishment looks as if it was lifted off a New York street. Racks of fresh bagels sit on one side of the register, with open plastic bins of multiple varieties of cream cheese in a glass cooler on the other side. Predictably weak coffee urns rest on the counter in front of the windows.

I don’t make the trip for the ambience, or the coffee, but instead, the bagels. Boiled before being baked to a golden brown crust, these bagels are puffy but not gargantuan, large enough to fill me up for several hours, but not so big as to invite a sense of gluttony.

Finally, a note on cream cheese: while living for multiple years in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I relied on a ersatz Jewish deli and gourmet foods juggernaut named Zingerman’s, just a block away from my home, for bagels and sometimes cream cheese. The less said about the bagels, the better (apart from the fact that they were “buy six, get six free” on Tuesdays.)

Zingerman’s also offered an “Original Cream Cheese,” made with a “traditional recipe” and “handicraft techniques”, and free of mysterious additives like Xanthan Gum. I have no shortage of enthusiasm for traditional recipes and handicraft techniques, especially with regard to cheese. But “artisanal” just doesn’t taste right to me on my bagel. Give me the supermarket stuff any day. Here, at least, I can count on the name “Philadelphia.”