- Here at The Meat Hook
we sell nice steaks. - We try to. - We sell tender steaks. - Yeah - Flavorful steaks. - Yeah! - Great on the grill! - Yeah!! - [Ben] But this steak,
the eye of round, is no good. So we're gonna try to cook
it a bunch of different ways to see if there's anyway we
can make this steak tolerable. - Maybe
- Maybe - Doing the Lord's work
today on Prime Time! - [Brent] We're back to the beef leg. Same muscle structure
for beef, pork, lamb. All of the muscles are the same so if you learn how to
butcher one of the animals, you can know how to do all of them. - Same muscle structure for Brent too. - Very cool. - You can find 'em on his leg. - Go ahead and look. Beef leg is four muscles: top round, bottom round, eye of round and the sirloin tip. Today we're going to talk
about the eye of round. - The most womp-womp of all the muscles on any animal I would say. - I would say this is
my least favorite muscle on any animal. - [Ben] Really? - [Brent] Yeah. - [Ben] Mine too. - [Brent] Why do you hate eye of round? - [Ben] For being from the leg I feel like it doesn't have as much flavor as the other cuts from the leg. I mean like you look
at that and you're like it looks look like a tenderloin, it looks like a filet. Like you could roast
this very very evenly. Very very nicely. It has a little bit of
fat on the underside. - If a customer comes in and says, "Give me all of your eye of round!" - I wouldn't want to say, "Are you sure?" I would be like, "Oh what are you doing?" - [Brent] "What are you doing?" - "Oh, like maybe this
would be better than that." - If they were looking
for like a roast for four, okay let's steer them
in another direction. (beep) don't ask your
butcher for an eye of round. - Save yourself. - Yeah exactly. You're
in for a (beep) dinner. - So what we're gonna do today is we're gonna take this cut that neither of us have any
affection for whatsoever and we're gonna try about four
different ways of cooking it to see if we can get something out of it. We have our four steaks.
Let's go through them. Number one: what you got. - [Brent] Just our control,
we're gonna cook it as a regular steak. Not
tenderizing it just in a pan, couple minutes each side,
get it to medium rare. - Perfect. Two. - [Brent] Resting in beef fat. Cooking it the exact same way but rather than just resting on a plate we're going to actually
submerge it into beef fat. - Number three. - [Brent] Vac pack beef fat!
[Ben] Beef Fat! - [Brent] We're gonna vac pack this, we're gonna submerge it into beef fat see if that does anything
to take oxygen out and actually impart beef
flavor and hopefully tenderize. - Okay. Number four, fat poach! Fat poach. - We're basically just
almost confiting but just dropping the steak in a low fat bath. I think the idea here is to see whether or not cooking it in its own fat will impart a better flavor and and better texture. - [Ben] Both things that
it needs desperately. - Exactly, yeah. - [Ben] Start saltin'! Are you ready for me to
pour hot fat on your hands? - [Brent] Yeah, great! I'm going to go see what's up, you want to get the water bath
going for the other two? - Yeah that looks weird. - It sure does. - We're not just going to dump it in? It's a comically large pot, we have to. How much money you want to put on turning this guy on with
a bunch of fat in it and it just short circuits? - (laughs) Or sprayed all over your face. - I really hope that doesn't happen. I really need that to not happen. - See how it goes. - Okay. (funky dance music) Alright, so we just learned
a pretty valuable lesson: beef fat is too thick to work
with the sous vide machine. - Don't put your electronics in beef fat. - Yeah, you might have
thought maybe we should have known that beforehand but we didn't. It's part of an experiment,
is to live and learn. So let's do a pot for our fat poach. - Yeah, we could just poach it and just take the temperature, keep it 135. - [Ben] Yeah, we're going
to do 135 for the water bath and the fat bath. We'll be able to measure that pretty consistently, we'll give them the same amount of time still. Really shouldn't be any difference, but this way we don't break an expensive piece of equipment. - [Brent] Grab our steaks. - [Ben] Grab our steaks. - [Brent] Set our timer, say an hour and a half to 90 minutes? - [Ben] Cool. - Yeah? - It's time. That steak has been sitting there. That steak has been sitting there! - [Brent] Remember when we said that this was our least favorite steak and we decided to put it in a bag and boil it for 90 minutes? - [Ben] Yeah, yeah.
- [Brent] Looks great! - Got our control.
We'll fry both of these, fry these, try them at the same time. - [Ben] Agreed. Hyaa! - [Ben] Gonna rest this in beef fat. Now we're gonna do these two steaks, searing em off. - Brent! You have a knife, let's eat a bunch of this steak! - Alright so, un-tenderized, un-rested, regular-ass eye of round steak. Beautiful cook, medium
rare, absolutely nailed it. It looks great. - [Ben] Looks great. - [Brent] Yeah. - Looks like a steak I would want to eat - (laughs) Man... - That's a terrible steak. - (laughs) That's a (beep) steak. - Come back in and
check on us in 3 minutes when we're done chewing this bite. Okay, so on a scale of 1-5 what would you give the flavor on our control. - The flavor, I'd say a 3. - Okay what about the texture? - Zero. - Zero? - This is not a steak, we'll
keep referring to it as a steak because we cooked
it like a steak but this is definitely not a steak. You should not cook it like that. - So the bar by which we're going to judge the rest of these is it should be at least on a flavor of 3. - Right. - The texture, if it's better than a zero we've already won. - That's great. - We've already done great. - Yeah. - Let's try the rested in beef fat, I think this is going to be better. I think this is going to be better. - Could be better yeah. - Alright, cheers. Well, the flavor is better. - Flavor's better? I'd go zero to maybe a two, that's not tender. - No - By any means. I wouldn't be mad if I
got this as a budget, you know, Tuesday night steak cut. - [Ben] I'd give it a 3.5
and I think 1 on texture, but the flavor is definitely better. - Yeah the flavor's really good. - That really worked out. - [Brent] Alright, vac pack. - [Ben] How are you feeling
going in on number 3? - [Brent] I'm already
more excited about it I feel like to the touch it already feels more tender than these do, these are rock hard. - Yeah. - [Brent] Very, very even cook. We probably cooked it a little too long, that went for a full 90 minutes. Let's see what the texture's like. - Yeah. Comparable texture to the other one. - Mhm. Surprisingly less beefy. - [Ben] Yeah. If you don't mind me going on a tangent, this is kind of why I don't like sous vide because I feel like you actually lose some of the complexity of flavors. - I would already say that I
prefer the rested in beef fat - I think so too. What would you give this on your flavor and texture spectrum? - I'd keep the one but
not the 3 and a half, down to probably a 2 and a half. - Yeah, think I'm with you. Alright, let's do fat poach. - [Brent] I'm pretty
excited about this one. - [Ben] Yeah? - [Brent] Yeah. - [Ben] Why? - A) I've never cooked a steak like this - Yeah. - So I'm generally very curious, think it's just a fun experiment. Color looks great. - [Ben] It seems to have
lost a lot more liquid than the other steaks have. - [Brent] Great, alright. - Oh that is tough. I think we'll go back down
to like zero on texture. - What the hell did we learn today Ben? - [Ben] I think we've
learned that if you just treat a steak, that's less than desirable, the same as you normally would. Salt it, fry it but then
resting it in beef fat will give you more like rich, more almost like beef umami flavor than cooking it in the fat
or like vacuum sealing it in fat and then the sous vide bath. - [Brent] Right, and
vacuum sealing I think it can be interesting in a lot of ways to impart other flavors into things. - Yeah. - [Brent] But I'm really surprised that it actually didn't make either of these more beefy. It actually made it more mild. You're right, generally
speaking resting in beef fat is kind of the way to go. - [Ben] Do you like eye of round any better than you did this morning? - No, no I don't.
- [Ben] Yeah, me neither. There's still so many
better steaks on an animal - [Brent] Sorry eye of round. - For us now, what this essentially means is we're doing the same
thing we've always done. Like when we need a little bit of lean for our ground beef,
we're going to grind the eye of round first thing. Other than that, it's still
not going into the steak case. It's unfortunate, it's a little bit better than I gave it credit at the beginning. But I'm still not exactly,
you know, impressed by it. - Yeah, wouldn't feel comfortable
selling this to customer and saying "Yeah, you'll be fine. Go cook this at home and you'll be happy" - [Ben] We can't let
any of this go to waste. So someone's got to eat it. So see you later. - (sighs) - For more episodes like this, click here.
