49 HEROESWORLD Lucki Maurer isn’t just adept at cooking steaks, he breeds the animals they come from. What’s more, he doesn’t just use the fillet cuts. His guiding principle is: “from nose to tail”. Many a guest and cooking student has marveled at the miracles he conjures up from allegedly inferior cuts. MEAT IS ABOUT RESPECT AND A GENUINE APPRECIATION FOR LIFE He doesn’t like the term “Landwirt”, which roughly translates to “agriculturist”. “I’m a farmer. A farmer from the Bavarian Forest,” he says. The word suits Lucki, who is as authentic as the luscious meadows on the doorstep of his home in Schergengrub and the Wagyu cattle happily grazing there. To Lucki Maurer, the farmer, “cattle breeding is not about making a product. It is a symbiosis between animals, nature and humans.” On his environmentally conscious estate, Wagyu cattle, Angus cattle and crossbreeds of the two spend all year on the pastures. It is a pure grassland farm with a suckler herd. The animals live the happiest life imaginable: “We don’t dehorn our animals, we don’t do embryo transfers, we don’t give them any preventive antibiotics, we don’t feed them genetically modified feed,” the son of an innkeeping family from the Bavarian Forest explains. His parents operate a four-star hotel in the region. At Schergengrub, every animal remains on the farm from its birth until its slaughter. Handling every single step himself is important to Lucki. GENUINE RESPECT FOR LIFE We’re in the “Stoi”, the former pigsty of the family-run farm, which Lucki inherited from his late grandfather. For two decades, Lucki has been teaching eager students about meat, barbecues and the nose-to-tail principle in his cooking classes. There is one question he hears again and again: “Hey, Lucki, how do I make the perfect steak?” If he were able to say it all in a single sentence, “we wouldn’t be spending the whole day doing a cooking class, we’d be seasoning a slab of meat, searing it on both sides and cooking it to the perfect core temperature,” as he always responds. But the perfect steak can’t be reduced to taking the temperature of the pan and picking the best T-bone. How long to sear it? It’s up to you! Some like it medium, others rare. That’s what the core temperature is for: 130 degrees for medium rare, 136 to 140 degrees for medium, 147 to 150 degrees for medium well – you can look it all up. A popular trick is to add a sprinkle of sugar to your salt rub, the basic mixture used for seasoning the meat quite some time before cooking it. When the sugar caramelizes, it releases additional roasting flavors. The salt dehydrates the meat. Sounds a bit like a fast-tracked dry-aging process, doesn’t it? In a way, it is: the result is, quite simply, better meat. No matter whether you are cooking a tomahawk, porterhouse, T-bone, club steak, flat iron, flank, striploin, chuck roll or any of the other succulent cuts from different parts
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