05.12.2007
TIME
Where's the Best Beef?
No wonder good steak is hard to find: it's going extinct, along with the elderly cattle it comes from. For years I have been chasing down the secret to the ultimate steak, and I had reason to believe it lay somewhere in northern Spain. So Madrid-based food writer Pedro Espinosa agreed to meet me deep in the Basque hills surrounding San Sebastián, from where we would eat our way cross-country to El Capricho, a restaurant near the tiny town of Jiménez de Jamuz in the northwestern province of León. We knew that José Gordón Ferrero, the restaurant's beef-obsessed owner, had been rounding up old, free-ranging oxen, pasturing them for up to four years, and then dry-aging the meat for as long as three months. When I heard that he planned to slaughter five of these rare beasts for a side-by-side comparison of the effects of long aging on mature beef, I realized that for a mere $68 a kilo, I could settle the best-beef question for good [...]