- This is the shoulder of a cow.
(light jazz playing)
What most people don't understand
is how many steaks actually come from a shoulder.
- So today Brent's got his apron on
and we're gonna show you where every steak comes from
on the beef shoulder.
(light jazz music)
It turns out that most of the most tender muscles
on the animal actually come
from one of the most hard-working parts of the animal.
This has more complexity than any other muscle group
on any animal,
and it's the thing we don't let our butchers touch
for months.
So how are we gonna do this, B?
- We are going to break this down the Meat Hook way.
First cut is to just take the foreshank off.
So the foreshank as we know it
is mostly used for braising.
You get some really, really good soup bones
out of it as well.
While this is great for many things, it is not a steak.
Do not grill this.
So we're gonna put it to the side.
- Chuck it.
- Next cut, we're just gonna take the bottom half
of the ribs off.
These are a continuation of the short ribs
but aren't quite as meaty or fatty as the short ribs,
so we're just gonna take them off and use them as trim.
- Do you ever think about when you're doing this
it might skip and you'll saw into your thumb?
I think about that all the time.
- Just sawing through the bone,
we're not sawing through any meat.
- As you can see, Brent's just following the line
that's naturally there.
The knife barely even needs to touch it.
This is just a natural seam,
and this is something
as you learn butchering more, and more, and more,
you find all these natural seams showing you
where the muscles go.
- So again, not a steak, going to the side.
Next up, we're going to take the entire spine out.
This is probably one of the hardest cuts to learn
just because it is so tricky
and everything underneath it is sellable steak.
- This is one of the most important parts
of butchering a shoulder,
because right underneath all of these neck bones
are some of the best steaks,
some of the most tender steaks we're gonna find
on the animal.
This is one of the reasons why it takes
so long for people to get the skills built up enough
so that they can be breaking down a shoulder.
We don't always get the animal with the spine intact.
There's a law about if the animal is over 30 months
you have to have the spine removed
for fear of mad cow disease.
With pastured animals that is 99.9% not gonna happen.
But the good thing about having the spine intact
is it protects all of those steaks.
It's also exceedingly different for a processor
to take out the spine
without cutting into the steaks even a little bit.
So this way, we get the fully-intact steak.
- That was just the cut to take off feather bones
in the first part of the neck.
You saw how hard it was for me to do that
with a 5-inch knife.
If this animal was over 30 and the processor
has to take the neck out with a huge saw,
that's gonna be way harder
and obviously not get the same amount of yield
on the steak itself.
Now that the feather bones are off,
we're gonna take the rest of the neck out.
(light jazz music)
That's a beef neck.
Definitely not a steak.
- All right, let's move on.
Let's get into some steaks.
So the first sub-primal we're gonna deal with,
is going to be the chuck roll.
Right now Brent is peeling off
what we call the Delmonico,
which is a configuration of four different muscles.
You'll see it sometimes
as the chuck eye steak, chuck eye roll, chuck roast,
I would say it's in Brent's top three steaks.
- A-number one.
- Number one?
- Number one.
- The eye of the rib eye in the surrounding muscles,
which are all very, very tender
as they're moving up into the shoulder.
I think it's a very, very valuable cut
that is kind of underrated.
- This is the whole chuck flat.
We're going to turn this section into our Delmonico steak.
So just to cut the Delmonico section,
we're gonna split this more or less in half.
This is our chuck, or chuck roast.
We're setting that aside
because it's a beautiful roast, great stew,
not necessarily a steak.
The Delmonico is my favorite steak
because it is literally the middle ground
between a rib eye and a chuck roast.
So, super flavorful,
but not the most tender
which is something that I really love out of steaks.
I don't love really lean, super tender muscles.
I like them to be a little bit more toothsome.
Gonna take a nice inch and a half off there,
and there we have our Delmonico steak.
- It doesn't look like a rib eye exactly.
You have muscle separation here,
you can see between each layer,
and you can see there are different muscles
all kind of grouped together.
What this gives you is a little bit of more fat
in between each muscle.
So you're gonna have not a nice real big fat cap here,
but you are gonna have a lot of intermuscular fat
and a lot of really, really thin fats
connecting all of these tissues together
so you get a really nice texture.
Our next cut is going to be the Denver and the Sierra
that's resting on top.
- Sits right underneath the Delmonico,
also just gonna peel this back.
- The Denver, or sometimes called the underblade steak,
is really, really good at medium rare.
Unlike most steaks I find with grassfed animals
that the better texture's at rare,
this one tends to loosen in toothsomeness at medium rare.
- So right here is just a big ole' ugly piece of flat meat.
Once we trim this down,
we're going to get a Denver steak out of it.
- All we need to do to start is take off the Sierra,
we can get a better picture of the Denver.
The Sierra looks a lot like a flank steak,
which you'll see here in a second.
Is it a flank steak?
Oh no, no.
It is not.
Brent, what's your experience with the Sierra?
- Don't even give it the time of day.
- All right.
Sounds like the Sierra and I have something in common.
So now to get to the Denver.
- The thing about seam butchery
is that a lot of muscles will be be directly
next to the other one.
One of them will be great,
and one of them will be not so great.
So is the Sierra and the Denver.
We really love the Denver, Sierra not so much.
- This is our Denver.
You just want to take a good look at which way
is the graining going.
As you can see,
there's some natural lines going that way
which means we want to be cutting that way.
- You can actually see that the muscle fibers
are even larger on this steak
which is different than the smaller muscle fibers
say, on a filet.
Larger the muscle fiber,
the more you actually want to cook it.
Next up, we're just gonna attack the brisket.
- You can see there's this natural seam
what you would pretty much call the arm pit of the animal,
and that's what Brent's following across
is trying to just get that seam all the way over.
That is what a brisket looks like
before it's cleaned up.
- Do not grill this.
It requires long, slow cooking in order to make it tender.
Next up we're just gonna do the shoulder clod.
- Oh baby we're getting into the good ones now.
Ooh.
Right here is the teres major,
sometimes called the petite tender,
or the shoulder tender.
And you can even see,
you can pretty much dig your finger underneath that steak.
The sinew's so thin.
And then you have the clod heart.
The clod heart is like the weather.
It's really, really hard to predict,
you never know what's going to happen
until you actually get there.
So this one we always have to visually look at
to see exactly how tender is the steak gonna be.
- We are going to trim out the petite tender
and cut some...
What do you want to call 'em?
- Ranch steaks.
- Ranch.
- As I mentioned earlier,
you can pretty much just reach in there
and you can find your line.
You don't even need a knife to pull it apart.
And I'm not using any pressure here really at all.
There's your shoulder tender, teres major, petite tender,
whatever you wanna call it.
- This is a small muscle,
but it's super easy to cook
and a lot of our customers' favorite steak overall.
If you like a hangar steak,
there's only one of those per animal.
There's only two of these per animal, so super limited.
But if you like the texture and it's a great value,
go to your local butcher,
pick this thing up.
- Now that we have the teres major,
we're just gonna trim this up of the excess muscle
that's all gonna go into stew or grind,
and then we have our clod heart.
It really depends on the animal
on if this is going to be tender or not.
When you're a high-volume processor,
killing animals and killing the environment,
you probably aren't too worried
about little things like old clod heart.
But since we're a whole-animal butcher shop
we need to find the value in everything,
so we always try it out.
- So this is our Ranch steak.
We love it
cause we can actually get a couple consistent steaks
out of the whole muscle.
It really does matter animal-to-animal as far as tenderness,
but this looks great.
Similar to the Denver that it has a little bit larger
of a muscle structure,
but find it's usually about on par as far as tenderness.
- Good weekday steak.
Easy salt, pepper, put it in a pan.
You're done.
- That's it.
All right.
Almost at the end.
- This is the one.
The flat iron.
The second most tender steak on the animal
after the filet.
It's great at rare,
it's great at medium rare,
it's great at medium.
- [Brent] Our actual shoulder blade,
flat iron steaks.
You really can't mess this steak up.
Great value, super tender, and great flavor.
- From the butcher's perspective
it's also one of the hardest steaks to get clean.
Because it is considered so valuable
and our customers love it so much,
we always want to get it perfect.
But it also has a very thick piece of sinew
kinda like the clod heart,
running right through the middle,
which makes it a little bit tricky to cut.
This is another reason why we save the shoulders
to be the last thing that people learn to butcher.
You can tell just by looking at it now, looks great.
There's no fat.
I don't care. You shouldn't care.
This doesn't need fat to be tasting good.
A lot of these steaks you're seeing today
don't have a lot of fat.
Doesn't matter.
They have a lot of flavor
because that muscles are being used so much.
They don't need that fat as a crutch.
- So this flat iron we sell whole.
We recommend cooking whole and then slicing after.
Great steak for salad.
Ooh.
- Ooh.
- Keep it healthy. - Ooh, salad.
- Really easy to just cook.
Two minutes each side.
Hot grill, nice crust.
Keep it rare on the inside.
Slice it, done.
It's fantastic.
- This is what is called the mock tender,
or the Scotch tender.
Do not let the name "tender" being in the title fool you.
It is not tender.
I like to say, "Make it a minute-steak, or make a mistake."
Come on, what a line!
Our last steak.
This is the real underdog.
- By "underdog" he means the worst steak on the animal.
I don't know why the hell we're actually even doing this.
It doesn't make any sense.
It's not a good steak.
You should throw it in grind.
Ben's got a hair up his ass
and he wants to grill it.
- So we know Brent's thoughts.
That is what we're gonna cook.
- Mm.
- I'm not saying it's gonna definitely be good.
I'm just saying I haven't had this in four years
and we're breaking a shoulder.
I just want to try something new.
I'm open to new experiences,
I wish you were open to new experiences.
- Save my hard-earned money
to go to the local butcher shop and buy a Scotch steak.
- You've never earned your money.
- True.
- Here we are at the end of our beef shoulder journey.
Starting first we have our ranch steak
from the shoulder clod.
Delicious.
Next up.
- Flat iron.
Lean, tender, easy to cook.
- Delmonico.
Like the rib eye,
as those muscles are going into the shoulder.
Really, really good flavor.
- Shoulder tender, or teres major.
Also lean, tender, easy to cook.
- Sierra. It looks like a flank.
Don't believe it.
- It's not.
Needs to be cut really thin.
Really good for fajitas or good for stir fry.
- Mock tender.
It sucks.
- Hold that judgment.
We haven't cooked it yet.
Last up, Denver.
It's good at medium rare or medium,
not at rare.
It's also called the under blade or
kind of a boneless short rib.
But it's good.
- Beef shoulder.
Come on, let's cook some steaks, B.
So what steak do you want to cook?
- I think I want to do the Denver.
- Great choice.
- What steak do you want to cook?
- I still want to go with my A-number one
first round draft pick,
Delmonico steak.
- Totally good.
And just because it's not a day that we work together
if I don't torture you,
I wanna do a little mock tender minute steak
just to make you try it.
- Yay.
- That's the enthusiasm I like to hear from my partner.
So we're gonna take these steaks,
we're gonna kick to the backyard.
We're gonna grill 'em up,
we're gonna eat some steak.
(happy jazz)
We'll start with your favorite, Delmonico.
- Yeah, let's eat a steak.
- Let's eat a steak.
Ooh, he's cutting the Denver!
- [Brent] Oh yeah.
- He's cutting the minute steak!
- Mm.
Start with the favorite?
- [Ben] Start with the favorite, let's go.
(both savoring food excitedly)
I don't think it gets any better than that.
- Let's see.
- That's pretty good.
- Great flavor. Very buttery.
- Buttery.
Actually even a little bit sweeter than the Delmonico.
Last but not least, let's do this.
- My number one.
Come on, man.
It's not bad.
- It tastes like liver.
- So. Yeah, okay.
The mock tender's not great.
But it's more tender than I expected it to be.
- Tough sell.
I was expecting it to be a zero out of a 10,
and I'd say it's a 1 1/2.
That's kind.
- That's way too harsh.
It's at least a four.
It turns out, steak from the shoulder are still great.
Now hopefully you know a little more about the steaks
you're gonna get at home,
and the complexity of the muscles that you're dealing with.
- Not every steak has to be a rib eye, New York strip,
or a filet.
There's a huge range of steaks out there.
Get to know the texture.
Get to know the flavor.
You can get radically different things from the shoulder.
- Go to your local butcher,
tell them Ben and Brent say "Hi."
- Hey. - Hi.
Hi.
(background crew laughing)
(happy jazz playing)