Intimidated by big cuts of beef?
Don’t be, you can save some money.
And today I'll show you how.
Let's get the most beef for your buck.
I'll be working with a Certified Angus Beef strip loin.
Probably the easiest to cut,
but it is an investment, so can be intimidating.
I'm just going to go through slice the bag a little bit.
I don't want to accidentally slice the meat.
So I like to cut on the fat side and be careful
when opening the bag
and then just pull it out.
Try to leave any purge in that bag
so you don't make too much of a mess.
Yeah, I’ll just pat it dry completely.
So purge is not blood.
And that's what a lot of people think
is just a protein saturated water essentially.
Takes the color from the myoglobin proteins and
that's it.
There's no blood to it, just a little bit of protein juices.
So this is going to be
the the kind of the rib end of the strip.
So this is where the strip starts. Okay.
And then this is the sirloin end of the strip.
So this is where it ends.
And then we continue on to the sirloin.
This is my favorite part right through here.
But because this is like a cut done
before, it's put in the bag, the colors are a little off.
Sometimes it can be angled.
So what I like to do is face it
and just make sure that when I'm cutting,
you can see there's a slight angle.
I'm going to cut it straight here
to make sure you get a nice flat cut on the end of this strip loin.
And then we're going to save this because,
look how beautiful that is.
Pound it down for like a thin breakfast steak
or sandwich steak or something like that.
Or what I like to do with stuff like this is turn to stir fry.
Now I'm going to make sure to utilize everything.
So any of this fat we’re going to save that to.
So now
I like cutting my steaks thick,
so I kind of about the same thickness as this knife.
So right there and I’ll mark it.
And then you just want to do a smooth motion as possible.
Keep your fingers back.
Sometimes I'll hold with one
after the knife is already through,
and then you just want to keep it flat.
That is an untrained strip portion nicely.
You wanted to keep it as consistent as possible,
and that's my favorite thickness.
I find that it cooks
nice, medium rare that way and stays perfect.
So now you know, I'll go through and I'll cut all the steaks
and then we can trim them, keep fingers back,
smooth fluid motions.
The marbling in this is just amazing.
So that is going to be a beautiful eating steak.
And I really like this.
Like I said, this really isn't that hard.
This is about keeping your consistent cut,
making not too much of a sawing motion.
You want to just kind of go in, pull back.
Most maybe three strokes, tops. That's it.
So you go in and then pull back and use the length,
the entire length of that knife.
That's why I like to use a long knife
when cutting steaks,
because you get in
to kind of break through that top fat
and then you can use the length
of your knife to pull through and pull up to cut in the smooth
fluid motion.
Now we're starting to get into the sirloin end.
So you can see you're starting
to get a little bit of silver skin here.
These steaks still eat just fine.
But since I'm doing this at home,
this isn't for a butcher counter.
I'm not doing this at a restaurant.
This is for my pleasure and what my family likes to eat.
I will take this sirloin section
and do a couple other things with it
because I've got a good amount of steaks now.
So first of all, again, I'll trim the fat
and we're going to save this fat
because I'm going to render that down later.
But for the sirloin part,
I like to cut it into the individual pieces
and make a couple of things out of it,
because one thing we're going to have a little bit of trim,
and I like to use all the trim for stir fry
because it's nice tender for pieces of meat
that I don't have a grinder.
So I'm not going to grind it all,
but I like to use it for something.
So stir fry is really nice.
Like this is probably one of the only pieces
I won't use must much of.
It's just kind of all silver skin.
There's a little bit of meat now.
Trim out.
Silver skin is what you think of when you think of gristle.
It's the stuff that doesn't
really cook down at low temperatures,
at higher temperatures.
Some of it does.
So when you're braising and slow cooking
and it gets up to 200 and some degrees
and sits there for a while, it'll break down.
But when you're cooking a steak, it doesn't really break down.
And that's when you get that gristle
that could be a little unappealing.
So here,
actually, I'll show right here, silver skin line here
and then around the back through here
so you can have this wedge triangle shape.
So what I like to do is just cut this out
and just use my knife to follow that silver skin
instead of pushing down, trying to cut through it.
I just kind of let it ride along that silver skin, kind of like
a like following a fish, taking the skin off of a fish.
And then you get this nice part here
and I'll come underneath and trim all this down.
You know that off.
And then you can take this silver skin here,
or just not just a little bit.
Keep my fingers out of the way.
Okay? Just to get you through
now, I'll get under it with this knife.
And again, just kind of right underneath it.
So I cut all that off so you can see a little bit better.
There's still a little, little bit left there.
Just cut,
push through lightly.
Just try and trim all that off.
And like I said, if you don't want to do this,
you can cut them into steaks, but now
we've got some good cuts.
This is great for stir fry.
And then this again could be stir fry or kabob me.
So I'll set that aside with my then cut steak for now.
Okay.
And then we'll get to trimming these steaks.
All right.
So here we have the strip, New York strip.
Some places will refer to it as Kansas City Strip.
All of it is a cut from the loin.
It's all going to be just about the same.
I'm just taking this fat down to quarter
to an eighth of an inch.
I do want to leave some of that on there.
It's just kind of traditional, the steak like this.
And then you have this what's called the tail.
You want a little bit of tail left on.
And this is just the traditional way.
If you wanted to, you could block that whole thing off.
You could pull all that fat off.
But I'm just cutting isn't a traditional steaks,
so I'm going to cut this tail just kind of at a slight angle
just to remove the excess fat.
So there's kind of what you would normally see
in the grocery stores in New York strip.
So again, I'll just go through all of these.
So right here there's a little bit silver
skin, there's a little bit more right here.
I don't always remove that.
It depends how thick it is
because they kind of keeps the steak together nicely.
Otherwise you can peel back a little bit.
But right here you'll see they're kind of like dots.
I like to cut those out for sure
and keep your fingers kind of curled and back.
Keep that thumb out of the way.
Don't need a full size knife like this.
You can just use a boning knife.
It will work. Absolutely.
Because you can push and drag through.
You just don't have as much leverage.
I feel like,
you know, sometimes you kind of have to saw a little more.
Your blade obviously doesn't get through the steak
as much as with a long knife.
So these are the two. Nice.
If you're ever going to
cut meat at home, we're going to practice.
These are the two to have as well as the honing steel
to keep them sharp.
But both of these are what you want boning.
And then this is more of your break or your steak cutter.
It's a good utility cutting knife.
This is good for smaller work, boning out back
ribs, cutting anything bone in and trimming as well.
Like this is great for trimming down these steaks.
If you want knives like these, you can check out
the brand store and check out the new butcher set.
You'll have everything you need to cut up big hunks of meat
like this, you can see is a good amount of fat.
But that's why we don't want to waste it.
If I had a grinder you could grind some of this together,
make steak burgers. Great way to use it.
We'll get that all the pot.
I cut it into small pieces because it creates a little more
surface area so it renders more efficiently and quickly.
And then we put about half a cup of water
in the bottom turn this on.
Once the water comes to a simmer,
I'll drop it down to a lower heat.
The water will help to start to render the fat, and that way
it won't burn the bits of fat in the pan, get fat rendering.
I got my initial steak here, the face cut,
which you can save for a breakfast steak,
but I love cooking stir fry,
so I'm going to turn that into some stir fry meat.
And since we have the fat rendering cut off that
and get that into my render,
you know, and I'll trim this down a little tighter
because again, it's going to be used for stir fry not a steak.
Get it on the render. It's fine.
And now a lot of people say cut against the grain.
Well, when you're cutting steaks,
you're already cutting against the grain.
The grain runs this way,
so I've already cut this against the grain.
So now
if I were cut against the grain, I kind of have to
I'd have to cut again this way.
So what I'll do is set a cut directly up and down, just
kind of have a slight
angle for my stir fry
because you're not really cutting
against the grain at this point.
But if you do an angle, you kind of get the best,
your best option here.
So this piece from that sirloin, you can see
the grain runs this direction
because I took it off the top of that steak.
So now to cut against the grain, I want to go this direction.
This one, you will actually get some against the grain slices.
And then here I'll just block this
because we're going into
now we're going into spring eventually some day.
And I like to do this in the kabob meat
again.
Or you could do steaks or stir fry whatever you want,
but I like to get variety out of my purchase.
So we've got some tallow rendering,
some nice stir fry, kabob pieces,
and then all of these beautiful strip steaks.
This is a great way to feed your family
multiple meals out of one strip loin.
You could cook this all this week
or freeze it for up to six months.
Hopefully this video is helpful and you can save a little money
when you can be your own butcher.
Join us again next time here in the test kitchen.