"Steak is what other meat wishes it could be." People reminisce about the best steak they ever ate, not the sort of response boneless, skinless chicken breast tends to trigger. The problem for author Mark Schatzker is that all those great tasting steaks seem to be memories. What he finds today, even in elite steakhouses, more closely resembles "textured salt water." Given the globalization of the food supply, you’d assume if something better was out there, it would have found its way to his fork by now. But as he discovered in Mongolia, where he ate both his worst steak ever and mutton (a tough, gamy meat generally scorned in the West) fit for the gods, sometimes things fly under the globalism radar. Maybe there was a steak equivalent of mutton in Mongolia, some pocket of the world where great steak was there for the asking. And so his search for a great steak became an epic quest to find that place, that steak.

Tell me I would call a book riveting that focuses on things like soil composition, technical aspects of the science of flavor, and the ratio of Omega 6 to Omega 3 in different foods, and once I recovered from the mild fit of hysteria, I’d invite you to pull the other one... it’s got bells on it. But Mark Schatzker makes this stuff genuinely fascinating by presenting it through the prism of his own passionate curiosity in a series of anecdotes and stories we can relate to, rather than dry data files and field reports. The anecdotes range from chats with fascinating, usually quirky people who just happen to be experts on such things, through conversations with breeders, butchers and other steak eaters who will go to incredible lengths just to get a good steak.

The book’s title and its tasty looking cover make it seem this book is all about beef and steak. And it is, but... What it’s also really about is passion. Enjoying a good steak will send you on a tour of local steakhouses, looking for the best. It takes passion to send you off on a quest through 100 pounds of meat and more than 60,000 miles, just to find out why this steak here tastes so different from that steak there. I’m a steak lover too, but I enjoyed this book for the passion, the humor and the people rather than the meat. It’s a fun read, echoing the sorts of pleasure the author finds in a good steak—something that makes you feel very good while you consume it, that is satisfying and delicious, but also leaves you hoping there’s more in your future.

Recommended.