Germany’s Black Forest Taught Me to Cook a Better Steak

When you shoot an animal, the meat turns really hard. Kind of like when a human dies, actually. This is why we must age beef or game—to break down the proteins and make it tender and delicious again.

I learned this important fact, and many more, as I grew up in Germany's Black Forest. My tiny home village is called Baiersbronn and we have eight Michelin stars between the few restaurants that are located there. I grew up hunting. My father was a hunter, and I learned how to appreciate whole animals as a source of food at a very early age.

If you really think about it, the heritage of all food comes from whole animals. If you want to go into the restaurant business, you must know this. You must know that an eight-ounce piece of cylindrical tender meat comes from a whole animal that was killed. A lot of people don't have this connection with their favorite cut, so I am trying to change that with my whole-animal cooking series at my restaurant, Nick and Stef's Steakhouse. During my last dinner, I did a whole roasted goat and I served goat milk macchiatos and goat milk panna cottas. This is my definition of nose-to-tail.

I think you grow up with this kind of appreciation when you come from more rural areas like I did, since it is embedded deeply in the culture. In my experience, it was totally normal to see a feral wild boar just popping out of the forest on my way back from school. My family owns a restaurant located in the Black Forest and still runs it to this day. It is a little countryside bed-and-breakfast that is popular among locals and tourists. I grew up in the middle of all of this. My mother ran the front-of-house and my dad ran the kitchen. My grandparents also ran a restaurant, and a lot of my aunts, uncles, and cousins work in restaurants, too. Thus, my restaurant-based life came naturally to me at a young age.

I worked at my first two-Michelin-star restaurant when I was 14 years old. By the time that I was 17, I interned at a three-Michelin-star-rated restaurant. I remember doing my homework from grade school in the kitchen and my homework from college in the bar of the restaurants that I worked in. From this point on, I became very comfortable with the long hours, the stress, and the bullying that comes from working in a professional restaurant environment. Then I moved to Los Angeles in my 20s and started working for Patina Restaurant Group.

I didn't know much English then but I slowly became the right-hand man for Joachim Splichal—Patina's founder and head chef. I worked in Australia, Austria, Dubai, London, Japan, toured around Formula 1 cooking for the circuit, and even worked at the world's only seven-star hotel restaurant. Still, I never lost my personal connection with the producers of my ingredients and drinks.

Remember, the real star in the kitchen is not the chef, but the product. I am saying this as a certified Master Chef, a title bestowed upon me by the German Chamber of Commerce. All good food is realized by the same idea: by working with what you have around you. Take pasta for example, whether it is soba, spaghetti, spaetzle—pasta developed into an international favorite dish by evolving into ethnic variations based on what ingredients were available to each rendition. Same thing with rice, and so on and so on.

If you look at the origins of simple techniques that you learn in cooking school, like making duck confit, curing and smoking meats for things like the many hams of the world, and other things like that, it was all done for practical purposes. For confiting and curing, it was because there used to be no refrigeration, so you had to preserve things. We still do this today because they taste great, but the roots of cooking techniques can teach you a lot about food. Dry-aging is another one of these techniques. I am the only chef that is dry-aging this much beef on-premises anywhere in Los Angeles.

In a weird way, aging meat has become my hobby. To date, we have sold around 200 complete animals—cows, pigs, sheep, goats—this year. Imagine seeing 200 animals walking down Grand Avenue in downtown LA?

At any given point, we have around $50,000—or two tons—worth of beef aging in-house. It is risky, since a power outage can potentially spoil all of this, but I love always living with a little bit of risk involved. I weigh, hang, and keep a journal on each piece of meat that comes into my restaurant. The financial responsibility associated with dry-aging in-house does not stress me out in the least. Nor does the thought of cooking a piece of A5 Kobe that is worth hundreds of dollars. Which, by the way, is not a matter of following rigid rules like "searing for five minutes on each side on this temperature," but more of feeling out each piece.

The way I test meat for doneness, and how I instruct everyone at my restaurant to do so, is by inserting a thin needle into the flesh and leaving it there for a few seconds. Then we place the needle on our upper lip—your skin is very sensitive to temperature in this area—to feel the temperature. This technique really helps your meat cooking become natural.

And this naturalness with food is what it is all about.

As told to Javier Cabral

Andreas Roller is the very humble chef behind Nick and Stef's Steakhouse in downtown Los Angeles. Visit their website for more info on his dry-aged meats and his whole animal cooking series.