Meat Experts Butcher One of the Most Tender Steaks: the Flat Iron — Prime Time

hey does can we afford like a real thing and we're in the butcher shop today and we're going to talk about the second most tender steak on an animal brent what's the steak the flat iron which comes from the chuck beef shoulder which is not the most typically sought after part of the animal heavily used muscles are usually not quite as tender but deep inside there we have a super tender super delicious steak turns out the flatiron is also one of the hardest things to actually butcher good thing we haven't practiced in a while yep here we go let's do it heavy [Music] as you can see here on the chuck this is where the neck is so the head would be coming off here this is actually right at the elbow so the arm would be coming off there and then our flat iron is buried right in here traditionally in the u.s this is pretty much all going to burger grind or to raising or roasting cuts that's it it really wasn't until recently we started really breaking these things down to get some good steaks we have the ranch steak we have the one off of the shoulder tender which is also a fantastic steak we have the whole chuck roll section which we have delmonico steaks chuck steaks then you have a whole brisket as well there's a ton of different things that you can seam out but really only a handful of steaks and it's crazy when you read old books where it's just kind of like you cut it this way you cut it like that and then you braise it and that's pretty much all that there was to a chuck none of the steaks brett mentioned were like ever in books before like the mid-2000s in the industrialization of beef your only tool was a band saw so everything's just going to be cut very quickly rudimentary on a big saw because it's fast we're going to get into it and just start butchering this job so the first thing we're going to take off is just what's called the chain which is on the inside of the vertebrae here one thing about the chuck is that it's often overlooked because this group of muscles is so important to an animal staying upright that it's just kind of assumed that all these muscles are just really tough what we do here at the meat hook is referred to as seam butchery you can easily see where a seam is and all you're doing is pulling that back the only pressure i'm using is actually with my free hand i'm not even really cutting just guiding my knife to get through the separation so the next section is one of the more difficult cuts of actually removing the entire spine it's difficult because this is where the chuck roll chuck roasts are underneath we want to preserve as much muscle as possible we need to be meticulous about going bone by bone up the vertebrae this kind of butchery takes a lot of work and a lot of expertise and that's why a lot of industrial producers don't really do this with a chuck it takes a lot of skilled labor which means a lot of money to get to these smaller stakes that don't have the market value of say a rib eye or a porterhouse so in 1998 there was actually a study done where two scientists were given one and a half million dollars to find like a new cut because the price of beef was so depressed they needed to find more cuts to sell in the market and what they came up with after three years of research was the flatiron it worked flatiron started showing up on shelves in your local grocery aisle it started showing up on the menu at applebee's what a trailblazer it's kind of mind-bending that like you could read books from like the 70s and 80s where they would tell you to buy a big piece of chuck and then seam out this beautiful steak but it was just kind of unknown to the mass meat market until like the late 90s early 2000s so the next thing we're gonna do is to pull off the whole chuck roll all the way from the neck through the rib eye steak is the same continuous muscle so we're just gonna pull that entire thing off right now [Music] next up we are just removing the denver steak seam butchery baby being super careful right here because you can see that we're starting to come up against the bone here's our shoulder blade our whole flap comes off trim that up turn it into a denver that's not for this episode second to last thing we have our whole brisket here trim can't all be steaks y'all some of it's got to be a burger that part we're going to cut out you don't want that not burger that's what a gland looks like they're disgusting it looks like a really big booger then we're going to take out our clawed heart which is this whole section here this is where we employ the other kind of butchery where we talk about seam victory a lot and it really really is a useful tool and a way of cutting this is just like trace the bone to get your muscles last but not least is our flat iron we just need to separate the actual shoulder blade here good cut good cut we do want to be super careful of everything else here that we are not going to necessarily nick it's not a huge muscle so we want to keep it as big and as clean as possible now we have our shoulder blade and you can see how small this is and we're gonna see how much smaller it gets there's still some trim work that needs to happen here each animal only has two shoulder blades and that means we only get four flat iron steaks per animal it's really important that we don't mess these up i'm going to take off this steak first so this hook is actually a pretty useful tool to just kind of like scrape along you're getting all the meat off the bone you have a very clean bone that way you can see as we get closer it's not getting any easier and believe it or not actually the hardest part is still to come so you have this flat side but on this side you have the bone coming up to a point here and going down here the interesting thing when you get to this point is you would think because these muscles are just separated by a very thin piece of bone that they would actually have a similar taste or texture and they actually have very different flavors in very different textures isn't butchering interesting i'm gonna take off what's called the scotch tender first don't let the name foy it ain't tender this is it guys we've been spending so much time just to get to this piece of meat right here that's it but we made it we made it we're there cabo [Music] brent pretend that you're our meat scientist and you are shown this cut what do you think is it going to be tinder is it going to be tough i don't think you have any inclination that this is actually going to be a good steak by looking at it right now here we have a lot of signo and then you can see an enormous piece of sinew straight in the middle i'd be pretty quick to actually just chop this up and grind it because it does not seem like an easy thing to do so when we talk about sinew we're talking about what is also called silver skin just like gristle itself it gets stuck in your teeth it's what protects muscles and does separate them you can't actually chew through it you want to get to the muscle itself these are the fibers that in your in your body are helping like when you do this it's not just the meat moving there's the connective tissue in between that are like pushing the muscles to move in this way or that way to all fit together for basic movements that's what this stuff does we're gonna start cleaning this guy up i'm gonna start by taking off this sinew on top and the name of this game is keep all the meat on the steak and your silver skin as clean as possible this is the easy part before we get to the hard part this is warm up if you look really closely you can see a grain and when you're cutting silver skin you always want to go with the grain if you go against it it just like will not ever come off cleanly and this thick pieces in you goes all the way through but it doesn't just go through flatly and it's not that thick so it thins out and it also kind of like waves down on each side which is what makes this steak so hard to get to this is the hardest part because you can see the first half but the second half is always like a wave and it's different every single time this is sloping this way that is moving that way this grain's going this way that grain is going that way so it's a really really difficult thing and it's just getting so much thinner it's very hard to trace this sinew which is why we save it as almost one of the last things that a butcher ever learns here before we've even finished it this is the amount of like sinew and a little bit of meat that i have already taken out of the flat iron we don't really do anything with this if you do something with us let us know i would love to learn how to be using all of the silver skin in a more productive way we don't want to throw it out one thing that you actually might see in a grocery store is the whole flat iron cut into stakes horizontally like this so it looks nice and lean but it has a thick tendon running running through the center of it makes zero sense why you would cut a steak that way if you like a really tender steak with an inedibly chewy part stuck in the middle which is why we actually do separate it and there you have it we'll still do a little bit more cleaning but those are our two flat irons if brent had been working as fast as i know he can breaking down a shoulder it probably would have taken what 15 minutes to break the whole thing down just to break it down but then to clean the stakes usually takes about twice as long so 10 to 15 minutes just to break that down but then 10 to 15 minutes just to clean the flat iron steak that might be why it's not seen as a like worthwhile endeavor to get this steak butcher shops have been carrying it forever but for the big meat market not in an industrial system when you're trying to move as quickly as possible you're not going to take the time to seam this out [Music] when you're taught to shop for steak you're usually looking for intermuscular fat to equate tenderness but when we're looking at a muscle we actually want to look at muscle fiber by looking at that we can tell about how tender it's actually going to be yeah they're actually both really good indicators but we're always taught fat is flavor but that's not the whole story in an industrial system fat is the only thing that really does carry flavor but for pasture raised animals the mussels that do the work carry a ton of flavor but sometimes they're actually just lean teach us about muscle fibers and what you're looking for the easiest way to tell the difference between muscle fibers is to look at something like the fillet which does zero work and has very small muscle fibers almost indistinguishable flat iron right next to it is also very very similar but we're not looking at a cross section but then if you look at something like this piece of trim we have huge muscle fibers here and by looking at that distinct difference you can tell this is not going to be tender this definitely is so why would our flatiron actually be tender it's not that hard working but it's getting all the flavor from being grouped into a large a large group of mussels that are doing a lot of work just by virtue of being in the shoulder being used 24 hours a day by the animal it's building up a lot of flavors the filet is the most tender muscle on the animal from a scientific perspective it is the most tender the flat iron from a scientific perspective is the second most tender muscle on the animal has so much more flavor but it's a fraction of the price the customer's coming in for the first time i went to a whole animal butcher shop i want to try something new yeah they think oh i got i got to get the most expensive thing that's going to be the best thing you don't have to talk to your butcher let us make a recommendation because this is a better value and almost absolutely fool proof you're going to be super happy with it and if you overcook it a little bit okay it's still going to be fantastic [Music] great day for outdoor grilling our grill is hot we're ready to go hot and fast we're cooking for maybe six minutes get as rare as we can it's hot out here it's hot down here it's hot everywhere it's hot everywhere like we said earlier this steak has a lot of flavor so we're just doing salt and pepper we're cooking this directly over the coals which a steak that has a lot more fat to it it's gonna drip it's gonna flare up you're gonna have to move it around a little bit we flipped this once and three minutes we're almost done you literally cannot mess it up and don't get it twisted you don't always need fat fat equals flavor but that ain't everything caramelize both sides feels done i think we're there our steak is rested it feels very nice [Music] that is super tender but still has more texture than a filet yeah but the flavor is just absolutely phenomenal it's beefy it's got a little bit of that minerality from the grass any steak that you can just kind of pull apart like this yo that texture is going to be dope that's tender that's going to be tender where does this rank in your like uh steak power rankings top five top ten top five this is such an amazing like weeknight meal good with absolutely anything i could never really get tired of this yeah i agree if you like filet mignon but you want a more flavorful but cheaper option flat iron is the way to go that's your huckleberry i'm your huckleberry oh that's my huckleberry what's that make me have a good night

Channel: Eater

Views: 547,319

Rating: 4.9036803 out of 5

Keywords: butchering steak, flat iron steak, butcher, butchering, butchering cow, butchering cow shoulder, butchering cow chuck, best steaks, best steaks on the cow, steak, how to cook steak, best steak, juicy steak, tender steak, how to buy steak, how to pick steak, beef, beef shoulder, beef shoulder steaks, flatiron steaks, flat iron steaks, prime time, prime time eater, Ben Turley and Brent Young, eater, eater.com, food, restaurant, dining, chef, food show, beef chuck, chuck, cow chuck

Id: EAMh4f8--Z4

Length: 16min 23sec (983 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2020