- Today in the test kitchen, I'm gonna show you how to
take a whole chuck roll, break it down into a roast, some stew meat and some tasty steaks. (upbeat music) This is a whole chuck roll. Normally in the grocery store, you see this cut into sections
and sold as a pot roast, which is great. But I'm gonna show you how to take this, pull out some individual muscles and create some really
tasty steaks out of here that you don't see everyday at the store. And what do you need to get started, is at least one large cutting board. I've got a second one because we're gonna get a lot
of different cuts out of here and I want a little extra space to work. The other thing you'll
need is some knives. I've got two for this purpose. I've got one flexible boning knife that I use for intricate cutting and then I've got a second knife
that's a little bit larger. I like using one like this because it makes it easier to
cut in one long smooth motion. Let's get started first
with the chuck eye. And what I will do is, I'll start to separate out this muscle. This is the same muscle
that was part of the ribeye and you can see that in this
here with all that marbling. I'm just gonna use the tip of my knife to help separate this piece. I don't wanna go in too deep because I'll get into
some of the other steaks that I wanna keep intact. As we're working, this whole
piece is the chuck eye roll. So now I can start to
roll this whole piece out and this will end up
as a really nice roast. As you can see, I'm using my hands a lot to kinda pull and separate the muscles. That's good because that way I'm not digging into other cuts. And now I'll just use a
little bit of my knife. Just the smallest part. You don't need to use
your whole blade here. You're just using it to
separate those muscles. We're not cutting steaks, we're just using it to aid in separation. One of my favorite steaks
we'll get out of here is the chuck eye steak. A lot of times people call
this the poor man's ribeye because it is where the ribeye
ends and the chuck begins. The ribeye would continue
into here and stop and then this is where the chuck begins. So that's that really
nice chuck eye steak. Ideally you can only get two
to three steaks out here, and I like 'em thick, so I'm gonna cut two
big chuck eye steakes. So I'm kinda about inch and a half thick, and I love this steak because
it's very much like a ribeye and you get all that great marbling. As you see in this part of the chuck eye, it starts to thin out,
get a little more narrow, and you lose that muscle definition that you see in the chuck eye. So realistically, you're not gonna get as good of a steak out of this section. Over here you have the chuck eye roast. So this could be used as a pot roast as is or another thing that's great about it is if you want some small pot roasts, you can cut sections and
have smaller servings and this makes a great little pot roast and then you've got a bigger
one to serve more people. For recipe using a
chuck roast, click here. I'm gonna dive back into the rest of this. Out of this section, you'll
get a lot of good steaks and whatever I have leftover for trim, I'll probably save for stew meat unless you have a grinder
or a food processor, then you could use it for ground beef. What I look for is this muscle here. So this is the serratus ventralis, which is what is the Denver steak. So from there, I'm gonna
look for this layer of fat and then I'll see some meat
that has some silver skin kinda shining on top. Well I will trim that off first before I get down into that Denver, because this is a cut that
you don't see very often that sits right on top of the Denver steak and it's called the Sierra steak. So I'm just gradually
shaving off that top layer. I'll trim over here, and then you can start to
see the steak underneath. It looks similar to a flank steak. So right in I can get
underneath it, and again, I like to use my hands a
little bit to start separation because if you're using your knife, you can start to cut into
things you don't want to. And now you can really see
where that separation is. I'm releasing the tension
between the muscles. Pulling, just barely cutting into it. We've got the Sierra. And I'll go ahead and just
trim that up a little more. I'm trying to get any excess fat and silver skin off of this steak and just trim it up a little bit, give it a uniform shape. And this is a steak that
you can use very much like a flank steak or a flat iron. It's got that similar shape. Grain runs with the length of it so that you can easily just grill it and slice it and serve it to a crowd. Next thing you know we're gonna get into are the Denver steaks themselves. Now this will require
quite a bit of trimming. There's just a thick
layer of fat in between the chuck eye, the Sierra,
and then the Denver. The trim pile I'm
creating, I want some lean. There's a good amount of fat to this, so some of that fat I'm gonna discard, some of the lean I'll keep because this will make a nice stew meat and I want my ratio to be appropriate. If I was gonna grind this, I don't want it 50/50, I want it like 70% lean, 30%
fat or 80% lean, 20% fat. Well here's another good piece I can just add to that trim pile. I'm just whittling this down, trying to expose any lean
underneath that layer of fat. And now that I'm getting there, I can really start to see this muscle. It kind of fans out and you
see the main sections here and then it starts to angle this way. So this whole section is gonna be where your Denver's come from. And then this you can use, but I would suggest using that for some nice lean stew meat. There's almost kinda a
line right through here. So I like to cut right
by that line, go down, and then this whole part makes
for some great stew meat. It's still got some marbling,
but it's a little bit leaner. So that makes great stew
meat for beef bourguignon or just regular beef stew. You can either cut long strips of Denver or what I'll do is take this back piece, square it off, and again,
stew meat, ground beef, trim, whatever you're gonna use it for. And I'll start at the small section, and I'll cut 'em about three
quarters to an inch thick. Too thick and they
might be a little tough, but just in that range, that
three quarters to an inch, you'll have a nice steak. Trim off a little of that excess fat, and you can see right there, the marbling, and this is amazing. And it's a super flavorful cut
of chuck that you rarely see. So it's a great opportunity to cut this if you can buy a whole
chuck roll yourself. There we got another Denver. I'll probably cut one more and then I'll take this
and I'll split it in half and then cut some more steaks. So out of one whole chuck roll, we got all these great cuts. We've got chuck roast for brazing, stew meat for stewing. We've got some trim that
could either be ground or leaned out further
for a finer dice stew. And then we have some
beautiful Denver steaks, great for grilling. Sierra steak, again, a great grilling cut, and then one of my favorites,
the chuck eye steak. For recipes and techniques like this one, remember to subscribe down below. Let us know in the comments which you're most excited to try. Thanks for watching and join
us again in the Test Kitchen.
