- Hey, 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?
- [Brent] 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.
- It turns out the flat iron 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.
(upbeat music continues).
This thing's f****** heavy.
Get one hook in the rib.
One hook in the shoulder.
And there we go
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- [Ben] 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 braising or roasting cuts.
That's it.
It really wasn't until recently
we started really breaking these things down
to get some good steaks.
- [Brent] 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 Brent mentioned were like ever
in books before like, the mid 2000's.
- In the industrialization of beef,
your only tool was a bandsaw.
So everything was just going to be cut very quickly
and rudimentary on a big saw cause it's fast.
We're going to get into it
and just start butchering this chuck.
(upbeat music continues).
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.
- 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.
(sawing sounds).
- What we do here at The Meat Hook
is referred to as seam butchery.
Where 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 roast 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 Porter house.
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 flat iron.
It works, flat iron 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 '70's
and '80's 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 '90's, early 2000's.
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- [Brent] So the next thing we're going to 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 going to pull that entire thing off right now.
(upbeat music continues).
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, but that's not for this episode.
Second to last thing we have our whole brisket here.
(upbeat music continues).
Whew.
Trim.
- It can't all be steaks, y'all.
Some of its gotta be at burger.
That part we're going to cut out.
You don't want that.
- [Brent] Not burger.
- That's what a gland looks like.
- [Brent] They're disgusting.
- [Ben] It looks like a really big booger.
- [Brent] Then we're going to take out our clod heart,
which is this whole section here.
- [Ben] This is where we employ the other kind of butchery
where we talk about seam butchery a lot, and that
really, really is a useful tool and a way of cutting.
This is just like trace the bone to get your muscles.
(upbeat music continues).
- Last but not least is our flat iron.
We just need to separate the actual shoulder blade here.
- [Ben] Good cut. Good cut.
- [Brent] 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 big and as clean as possible.
- [Ben] Now we have our shoulder blade and you can
see how small this is and we're going
to 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.
- [Brent] 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
and 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
and very different textures.
Isn't butchering interesting?
- Maybe.
- [Ben] I'm going to take off
what's called the scotch tender first.
Don't let the name fool you, it ain't tender.
(upbeat music continues).
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.
- [Ben] We made it.
- We're there!
- Cabo.
(upbeat music continues).
Brent, pretend that you're a meat scientists
and you are shown this cut.
What do you think? Is it going to be tender?
Is it going to be tough?
- I don't think you have any inclination
that this is actually going to be a good stake
by looking at it right now.
Here, we have a lot of sinew.
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 a 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.
- [Ben] 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 going to start cleaning this guy up.
I'm going to 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 warmup.
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 piece of sinew 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.
- [Brent] 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.
- [Ben] This is sloping this way, that is moving that way.
This grain is 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.
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 steaks horizontally like this.
So it looks nice and lean,
but it has a thick tendon
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.
- [Ben] And there you have it.
We'll still do a little bit more cleaning
but those are our two flat irons.
(upbeat music continues)
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 it 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 stake.
Butcher your shops have been carrying it forever,
but for the big meat market.
- [Brent] 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.
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 is 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 muscles 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.
- [Brent] The easiest way to tell the difference
between muscle fibers is to look
at something like the filet
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,
you 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 flat iron actually be tender?
- [Ben] It's not that hard working,
but it's getting all the flavor from being grouped
into a large group of muscles 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.
It has so much more flavor,
but it's a fraction of the price.
- The customers coming in for the first time
I went to a whole animal butcher shop.
I want to try something new.
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 foolproof.
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.
Great day for outdoor grilling.
(upbeat music continues).
Our grill is hot. We're ready to go.
Hot and fast. We're cooking for maybe six minutes.
Get it 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.
- [Brent] We're cooking this directly over the coals,
which a steak that has a lot more fat to it,
it's going to drip, it's going to flare up,
you're going to have to move it around a little bit.
We flip this once in 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 it ain't everything.
- [Brent] Caramelize both sides. Feels done.
I think we're there.
(upbeat music continues).
- [Ben] Our steak is rested.
It feels very nice.
(upbeat music continues).
Oh wow.
(upbeat music continues).
(happy humming).
- 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.
- [Ben] 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.
- That's tender.
- Where does this rank in your like,
steak power rankings?
Top five, top 10?
- Top five.
This is such an amazing like, week night meal.
Good with absolutely anything.
I can never really get tired of this.
- Yeah, 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.
- No that's my huckleberry.
- What's that make me?
- Have a good night.
- (Upbeat music continues).