- 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.
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which you're most excited to try.
Thanks for watching and join us again in the Test Kitchen.