I'll Probably Get Mad Cow DiseaseYou can find T-Bone Steak in Germany After All

If I do, I'll just walk around saying "Denny Crane!"

T-Bone steak is almost impossible to find in Germany. First, long before there was mad cow disease (or BSE its close cousin, the human-brain wasting CJD), the average German had a tough time even thinking about buying a steak with a bone in it. Then along came Mad Cow, and T-Bone was banned in most of Europe for several years starting somewhere around 2001.

Despite that, I somehow managed to have one of the best T-Bone Steaks (Fiorentina) of my life in Tuscany in 2003 ... I had given up looking for T-Bone in Germany, and I wasn't paying attention to the news about Mad Cow that much, so I didn't know I was eating banned beef at the time. So I might really be muttering "Denny Crane" sooner than I think.

Well, the Ban was indeed lifted in late 2005, but true to form the good stuff remains tough to find in Germany ... Germans eat a lot of pork, but not a lot of beef ... its too expensiv.

But I was walking through the Kleinmarkthalle on Saturday and lo and behold, I spot a big hunk of beef that looked like a rack of T-Bone. Sure enough, it was. Here's a big 750 gram slice of it.

And here's the same slab of beef blackened ... I didn't mean to blacken it, but it didn't hurt the taste too much. This was really good ... I even found giant baking potatoes to go with it. Go figure.

You can take the boy out of America, but you don't take America out of the boy.