Obviously, we love a great steak as much as anyone. And there is nothing we dislike more than when a simple mistake ruins a fantastic, tender steak. And that is cutting it wrong. You need to slice it the right way. Cutting Steak Incorrectly Can Ruin a Meal With any steak cut, you should always slice against the grain, which means against the direction that the muscle fibers run.
Cutting Grass-fed Steak This is even more true with grass-fed beef because of the muscle formation of cattle and how the cooking process is a bit different. The Perfect Steak Just to review our rules for enjoying both popular cuts and harder to find steaks: Always rest your steak for ten minutes or more, use a very sharp knife, and cut THIN, against the grain. Think this is nonsense?
Not to be confused with grains like cereals and legumes, the grain of the meat refers to the direction that the muscle fibers lie in your cut of meat. The first thing you want to do is look for the grain by seeing what direction lines move across your piece of meat. You can see them on both cooked and raw cuts, and they resemble long streaks. In the photo above, you can see that the fibers more or less run vertically from top to bottom.
The grain of the meat is easier to identify in certain cuts of meat. The Quality Mark is your assurance the beef and lamb you buy is New Zealand grown, consistently lean and tender. Only beef and lamb that has met the highest quality standards can hold it. Preventing your meat from becoming chewy requires spotting the grain.
As I mentioned above, the muscle fibers are tough. You see, the fibers themselves are tough cookies. They have to be. Their job is to move all the moving parts of an animal that is much much bigger than you. Try and tear a single muscle fiber by stretching it along its length, and you'll have a pretty hard time. On the other hand, pulling individual muscle fibers apart from one another is relatively easy.
Try it: Get yourself a flank steak, cut off a small square of it, and try yanking it apart by holding it with the grain running between your hands. Can't do it, right? Now rotate it 90 degrees so that instead of pulling along the length of the muscle fibers, you are pulling them apart. Much easier. So before putting a piece of flank, hanger, or skirt steak in your mouth, the goal should be to shorten those muscle fibers as much as possible with the help of a sharp knife.
If you cut with your knife parallel to the grain, you end up with long muscle fibers that are tough for your teeth to break through. Slicing thinly against the grain, however, delivers very short pieces of muscle fiber that are barely held together. Really, that's about all you need to know, so you have full permission to stop reading right now.
For those of you, who like me, had the greatest geometry teacher in the world in 9th grade and have thus been instilled with a preternatural desire to draw triangles and measure stuff, well, in the words of Mr.
Sturm, get your gas masks, because we are climbing Mount Elegance, and the air up there is quite thin! So final question to answer: quantitatively, how much of an effect does this actually have my meat? All Rights Reserved. Sign Up Log In Follow. Double Check Do you really want to delete the list,?
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