http://www.chicagoreader.com/feature...urants/080228/

The Meat Pushers

A downtown Chicago skyscraper houses a beef-industry brain trust.

By Mike Sula

February 28, 2008

"With ground beef recalls, mad cow scares, and the environmental hazards of
industrial livestock production in the news, it's getting tougher to sell
red meat these days. In 2006 Americans ate an average of 65.8 pounds of
beef, according to the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. If that sounds
like a lot, consider that that's down from more than 75 pounds in 1980, and
the trade organization predicts a continuing decline.

But each week in an office suite on the 18th floor of a Michigan Avenue
skyscraper in Chicago, down the hall from a psychotherapy practice and the
Poetry Foundation, the staff at the Beef and Veal Culinary Center goes
through that much meat and then some, trying to figure out ways to keep
people eating it.

The center, which operates under the auspices of the NCBA's marketing arm,
develops some 100 recipes each year for the organization's consumer and
food-service divisions. It also does product testing for manufacturers. One
recent morning several employees were evaluating two commercial marinades
and four rubs on some burgers and steaks they'd grilled in the test kitchen.
A pair of rib eyes that had been steeped in a whiskey-flavored marinade for
15 minutes got the thumbs-down. The meat had an assertive, treacly,
artificial odor, and the marinade had somehow inhibited the Maillard
reaction, a chemical reaction responsible for browning. The steaks looked
sickly and gray next to an unmarinated pair exhibiting a tasty-looking char.

"That's terrible," said Jessica Gordon, the center's senior culinary
manager.

"Flavor companies are in the business to sell flavor," said executive
director Dave Zino. "I think sometimes the attitude is, 'If one is good, ten
's gotta be better.'"

The center was the first tenant to move into 444 N. Michigan back in 1976.
At the time it operated under the auspices of the National Livestock and
Meat Board, which later merged into the NCBA. It's currently funded by the
Beef Checkoff Program, an initiative started under the 1985 Farm Bill that
assesses $1 per every head of cattle sold. In the words of the USDA, the
program is designed "to strengthen the position of beef in the marketplace
and to maintain and expand domestic and foreign markets and uses for beef
and beef products."

Zino, a Kendall College grad, has been the center's director since 2004. He
came on board three years before that, near the beginning of the beef
industry's big push for flatiron steak, a muscle that until then typically
had been ground up with the rest of the chuck. "We basically did a
dog-and-pony show," says Zino, who acted as a chef-spokesman for the
project. "We went to meat packers, steak cutters, retailers, chain
restaurants. My role was basically cooking the steak up, maybe coming up
with some recipe ideas." Many of the dishes the center devised-like
sesame-soy steak stir-fry in wonton cups and mini steak tacos with pico de
gallo-made their way into ads or brochures or onto sealed packages of
supermarket meat. "I probably cooked more of those steaks than any human
being," Zino says.

The center is equipped with both a professional kitchen and a
consumer-oriented test kitchen stocked with supermarket staples, a
microwave, and ordinary gas and electric stoves. Here the staff uses mostly
middle-grade choice cuts (mostly sourced from Jerry's Quality Meats in
Skokie IL) to approximate the average household's cooking and eating habits.

"This is a big country, and not everybody will have Thai curry paste," says
Zino. "So we need to be careful when we're developing consumer recipes to
make sure that they're available basically around the country."

Even bearing that in mind, the staff will occasionally overestimate
consumers' kitchen savvy. Zino tells me about a focus group the center
assembled to evaluate some of its recipes: one participant said he didn't
like the ones that called for dry red wine because he could never find it in
powdered form at the grocery store.

Last month the NCBA launched its latest ad campaign. Created by Leo Burnett,
it features a series of fantastic giant landscapes, or rather "beefscapes,"
like something Homer Simpson would dream about: towering beef mountain peaks
topped by creamy Gorgonzola snowcaps, a river of sauce running over a bed of
mushrooms and lentils between steep tenderloin banks. "Discover the Power of
Protein in the Land of Lean Beef" is the clumsy tagline, delivered in radio
ads by Matthew McConaughey. The campaign was designed to integrate two
themes the NCBA previously used separately-the nutritive qualities of beef
and the American "passion" for it.

In a departure from previous campaigns, Zino and his crew were directed to
develop their recipes after the ads were created rather than before. So for
an image of meat canyons split by a golden brown stream, they came up with
crumb-crusted top sirloin and roasted garlic potatoes with bourbon sauce, a
dish that might sound a little involved for the kitchen novice but in fact
calls for nothing more exotic than prepared mustard and ready-to-serve beef
broth. For a scattering of beef boulders set atop a whole-grain beach, they
developed Moroccan-style beef kebabs with spiced bulgur, which gets its
whiff of the Orient from pumpkin pie spice and golden raisins.

Zino, whose computer alerts him to the arrival of new e-mails with the sound
of a lowing cow, says that despite all the beef he eats on the job he still
eats it when he's not working. But then what else would he say? "I see
myself not only as a chef but as a marketer," he says..."

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