So you can cook an expensive, tender beef cut, like ribeye. Excellent. This is about
how to cook some not-so-tender cuts — steaks with a lot more flavor, but they require some
slightly more specialized knife work to make them easily edible — knife work either before
cooking, after cooking, or both. We're going to talk about the hanger steak, the short
rib (yes, short rib can be a steak) and this one: the skirt steak. It's so small! Or is
it? Ba dum. Ba dum. This parody so it is fair use ba da dadada!
This is the "outside" skirt steak. There's an inside skirt steak and an outside skirt
steak — both are cuts from around belly of the animal, but the outside one is way
better, in my opinion. Much more tender.
First thing I'm gonna do is cut it into much shorter pieces — pieces as wide as my pan.
This also allows me to divide the meat into pieces of like thickness. That thin one on
the right is gonna cook in literally seconds. The thick one on the left will take like 5
minutes or so, and now we're free to cook each segment for exactly the time that it
needs.
The first thing you'll notice is the very prominent and coarse grain of the meat — the
meat fibers running side to side.
Most of these more esoteric steak cuts are not steaks in the narrow definition of the
term. Remember, the narrow definition is a single-serving cut of meat cut against the
grain, so that it has short meat fibers running up and down, instead of long ones running
side to side.
The tender cuts from the animal's back are from huge muscles that are thick enough to
be cut against the grain. These cuts from the belly are much thinner muscles and therefor
simply cannot be cut into steaks against the grain, thus necessitating some more specialized
treatment from us, the cook.
The grain structure also makes these cuts very good at absorbing a marinade, probably
because of the extra surface area those ridges offer. I marinate flank steak, which is similar
cut from the belly, but I never marinate a nice outside skirt steak.
I see no point. It has such beautiful, strong flavor all by itself, thanks to that fat.
That's what the flank steak doesn't have. Look at the fat on the skirt, I wouldn't dream
of trimming that off. I'm simply gonna cook it to the point where most of the fat has
gone deliciously melty.
Sometimes you'll get skirt steak with this very tough membrane or sheet of connective
tissue still attached. You'll know it when you see it, and it has to be trimmed off.
But this on the flip side — this is not that. This an inconsequentially thin membrane
that does not need to be trimmed. Don't bother.
You'll know the one that needs to be trimmed when you see it. It's like a rubber band coating
the meat. This meat needs no trimming at all. It just needs some pepper and salt. Go easy
on the salt, because it's extremely thin meat, and go easy on the oil. It's plenty fatty
as it is.
I'm using my cast iron pan, and I've got it quite hot. Remember the counter-intuitive
law of steak cookery: the thicker the steak is, the lower the temperature you have to
use, and vice versa. With an extremely thin steak like this, you need very intense heat
if you want any chance of getting a golden crust on the outside before the inside is
overcooked.
I'm putting the thicker, longer-cooking pieces in first and along the edge of the pan, where
it's a lot less hot. I'm putting that thin little Scooby snack right in the super-hot
center, and if things don't quite fit yet, don't worry — they will soon, see?
I'm doing constant flipping — flipping every 30 seconds or so. I'm 100% sold on that
new-fangled technique. Yo can see the crust build gradually. Though I can already see
some pink juice pushing out of that paper-thin piece in the middle, so that really needs
to come out.
Remember carryover cooking — the phenomenon where heat from the outside of the meat continues
to move into the interior during resting. That effect is much more pronounced on a very
thin piece of meat, so you've gotta pull a cut like this when it's still probably quite
raw on the inside. It won't be raw after it rests.
That said, I like to cook outside skirt steak to medium or maybe even medium well. It's
tender enough that it can take it, unlike inside skirt steak. And with really fatty
cuts, it pays to give the fat more time to render and melt. The fat will supply the moisture
that you lose by cooking the steak to a greater doneness.
That thickest cut is, of course, taking the longest. I'm looking to see plenty of pink
juice pushing up. By the way, you need intense heat for a thin cut, but I'm still not on
high heat here. I'm on medium high, because I have a crazy powerful electric stovetop.
You want to see what high heat on my stove does to steaks? That just tastes like a lump
of coal. Don't believe the chefs who say you gotta crank your stove as high as it'll go.
Every oven is different, gas stoves are often less powerful, and it simply takes experience
to learn what setting on your stove will get you a golden brown but not burned crust.
OK, I'll let these rest a few minutes, and then I'm gonna cut them all in half, with
the grain. Because the next thing I'm gonna do is slice them very thin against the grain,
and the resulting shorter slices will be perfect bite-size pieces.
This is the crucial step. You have to cut a steak like this across the meat fibers.
If you don't, it'll be inedibly chewy. But if you do cut against the grain, look at that.
These short little meat fibers just pull apart almost effortlessly.
That has such strong beef flavor, I think it needs no marinade or any extra flavoring,
though if you want one, a common choice would be chimichurri — basically South American
pesto.
You peel a couple garlic cloves. Not too many, because the garlic is gonna be raw, and raw
garlic is orders of magnitude stronger than cooked garlic. Then a big pile of fresh herbs.
Most Uruguayan or Argentinian recipes I've seen call for parsley and oregano. I hate
fresh oregano, so I use parsley and cilantro instead, but you can use whatever you want.
Then you just chop all that up as fine as you can get it. Some people do this in the
food processor, but in order for that to work, you'd have to put in the olive oil, and olive
oil tends to go bitter in food processors for science reasons. It's easy enough to hack
this up by hand, and a lot of people would include a fresh red chili in there. I only
have dried today, but that's fine. Pinch of salt, a little pepper, and then just enough
nice olive oil to turn this into a sauce.
Then a touch of acid. I think red wine vinegar is the traditional thing, though I use lime
juice sometimes. This is not a vinaigrette. That would be way more vinegar. Chimichurri
traditionally has just a splash of acid, though it's your food and you can make it taste however
you want. I think I put a little too much salt in there, so I'm gonna dilute it with
more oil.
Right now that just tastes like all of those ingredients chopped up and combined. But after
it sits for a few hours or overnight, the flavors really merge. You can just spoon a
little over your steak. That's probably too much. Very strong stuff. But very nice. Outside
skirt steak — it may be my single favorite single piece of animal protein.
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OK, steak #2. Short rib. Intercostal muscle. This is known as possibly the best cut for
braising — long, slow, wet cooking until it goes soft. Short ribs are heavily marbled
with fat, which keeps them moist during long cooking, and they have a lot of connective
tissue around the bone, which dissolves in a braise and makes for a delicious sauce.
But unlike most other braising cuts, it doesn't actually have that much connective tissue
inside the bulk of the meat itself. It's shockingly tender, especially if you get the biggest,
meatiest English-cut short ribs you can find, which will generally be from the ribs extending
down from the chuck section, or from the rib section. Those are the ribs that come down
from the rib roast or the ribeye steaks, so of course that meat is tender.
You just have have to butterfly it to make it into a wide, flat steak. I'll show you
two methods. First look at the bone — it'll usually be a little off-center, and I really
prefer to start cutting on the side of the bone that is closer to the edge. Just cut
down along the bone, as close to the bone as you can get, then stop before you get all
the way through. Open up the meat like a book. That flap of meat that was thicker on this
side of the bone makes a better hinge to open this up.
Then I'm gonna cut this thicker side of the book into half its current thickness, again
stopping right before I go all the way through, then opening it up. You can make a few more
little shallow slices to make it lay as flat as possible. That's one way to do this.
Another way is to do what's called "accordion" cutting. You cut down along the bone as before,
and then rather than opening it up, you simply flip the meat around and make another cut
straight down but not all the way through, then you can unfurl the meat like the bellows
of an accordion. That might be a little easier if you're doing three or four cuts to make
super-thin Korean-style short ribs, for example. But I think either way is just as easy for
doing the two cuts it takes to turn a short rib into a nice thick steak. Salt, pepper
and oil.
And since it's a nice thick steak, it counterintuitively needs less heat. I'm just on medium heat here.
Again, flipping every 30 seconds, but after my first flip, I'm going apply my culinary
brick — otherwise known as a brick wrapped in aluminum foil for hygiene. Hygiene is also
why I waited until that first side had a little sear on it before I put the brick on. That
way the brick is not touching raw meat right now. It's touching a sterilized surface, so
it won't now cross-contaminate the other side when I flip, and I will keep flipping every
30 second.
The brick isn't necessary, but a butterflied cut like this might not really lie flat against
the pan otherwise — it'll sorta tent up around the hinges. The brick helps you get
even contact and thorough crust formation along the entire area of the meat.
Just like with the skirt steak, I'm shooting for medium here, rather than medium rare — to
give all that fat in there more of a chance to melt. So rather than looking to see the
first little bits of pink juice surfacing, I'm looking to see lots of pink juice coming
up and pooling on the meat. That usually happens at medium.
Out this comes, let it rest, then I'll slice this thin. It's tender, but it's not super
tender, so thin slicing helps, and you can try to slice it against the grain, but the
the butterflying tends to give you a steak where the grain is running in multiple, crazy
directions, so just do the best you can.
A little finishing salt maybe. That's smoked sea salt.
Shockingly good steak. The fat in this cut has a slightly gamey flavor that really reminds
me of lamb, especially when you gnaw on all that delicious stuff around that bone.
Now, the beef cuts we've been talking about are often known as butcher's cuts — little
odd scraps that butchers historically kept for themselves because only they knew how
to deal with them and only they knew how good they are. The third and final cut we'll discuss
is kinda the archetypal butcher's cut: the hanger steak, sometimes simply called butcher's
steak.
This is the favorite steak cut Joseph Egloff, the rancher whose cows I am cooking today.
He raises grass-fed beef here at Rocking Chair Ranch in Monroe County, Georgia, just north
of where I live in Macon. Rain or shine.
"The hanger, I think, has extremely beefy taste. It comes from just above the diaphragm
of the animal, above the brisket, on the top side.
That's why they call it the hanger — it kinda hangs down from the diaphragm, and there
is only one on every animal, so it can be hard to find. Certainly a key to excellent
steak cookery is to find a butcher or a rancher whom you know and whose work you trust, and
I trust Joseph. He butchers his animals on site, so he knows exactly what he's giving
me.
This smaller hanger here is from a somewhat younger animal. It would be a little bit more
tender. But I'm gonna cook this bigger one from an older animal. It'll have beefier flavor.
I just thawed it in a bowl of cool tap water. It took about 40 minutes in there, and here
it is. This is gonna take some more advanced home butchery to prep. First thing to do is
trim off the silverskin — that's this rubber-band-like connective tissue here. You can clearly see
and feel how it's different from fat. It will not melt during cooking. It's gotta come off,
and you can do that with any sharp knife, but if you have a really thin knife like this,
that's probably better. This is from a little company in Ohio called Warther.
Knives made with a stamped blade rather than a forged blade are generally really thin and
help you slip under that silverskin and shave it off while removing as little of the meat
as possible. I'm no blade-master. I find it often helps to get a strip of silverskin started,
and then pull up on it while you shave through the rest. That's a pretty foolproof approach,
if inelegant.
What I don't want to do is trim off any of the fat, if I can avoid it. That fat is delicious.
I'm just trimming silverskin. There we go. There is a remaining band of connective tissue,
and it is running straight down through the middle of this meat. It is one of the chewiest
animal pieces you will ever encounter.
You could simply cook this thing whole, let it rest, then carve it down the middle and
shave off that tissue before slicing up both sides. I prefer to take it out now, so that
I can cook both sides of this individually. They benefit from separate treatment, because
you'll notice they're not the same size. That's not an anatomical aberration. This is a standard
asymmetry on the animal. One side of the hanger is way bigger than the other.
So I'm gonna separate them by just slowly unzipping the meat along the seam of that
connective tissue. I don't want to waste any of this precious meat. I'm cutting right long
the white part, until I've got the halves separated. That bigger piece is now totally
clean.
I just have to peel the connective tissue from this smaller half. Kinda looks like a
strip of bacon. Alrighty. Pretty minimal trimming waste there, I'm pleased with myself. Ok,
now I've got these two pieces that kinda look like little tenderloins. And in fact, the
smaller one, I'm just gonna cut in half and I'm gonna pan-roast them like loins. Cutting
in half, again, helps them fit in my pan and gets me two piece of more consistent thickness.
That thinner half will require less cooking time.
This bigger side you could certainly roast or grill whole as well, but I'm going to butterfly
it into four thin steaks. First up is this part that kinda hangs off to the side.
I've seen people basically discard that as trimming. That's crazy. Take it off, cut it
to half it's original thickness and stop right before you go all the way through. Open her
up, and that's a perfectly lovely little steak there.
I can get some bigger ones out of this. I'll cut this into three, trying to get three pieces
of roughly equal mass, bearing in mind that the middle part there is much thicker. Again,
just slide the knife in there and cut to half its thickness. Open it up and give it a few
shallow cuts to get it to lay nice and flat. And then some people go the further step of
scoring this against the grain to give it a little more surface area, maybe tenderize
it a little bit. I don't think that really does much.
This technique of butterflying chunks of hanger into individual thin steaks is something I
really associate with French bistros. The French call hanger "onglet," and it's one
of the classic cuts for steak frites — French bistro steak and fries.
I've seen them cut even thinner in that context. With three cuts like this — three flaps,
each a third of the steak's original thickness. I find that pretty tricky to do, but maybe
you're better with a knife.
There you go — there may be only one hanger on the animal, but it's not just one steak.
It's like four to six portions. Lordie look at how beautiful that meat is.
A little salt, pepper and oil on one of those little bistro steaks. By the way, one of the
reasons I'm kinda loving my cast iron pan again is that the temperature is just about
perfect for steak when you see the residual oil on it is just starting to smoke. That's
a great rough indicator.
Flipping every 30 seconds — watch that crust slowly build. Flipping often instead of once
gets you more even cooking, and it's easier. There's no surprises. If your heat is too
high or too low, you're gonna see immediately. If there's a little a burning going on, you'll
see it and you can turn the heat down before it's too late.
With these coarse-grained steaks, I find the visual trick of just looking for pink juice
to be particularly effective. It's really easy to see as it pools in those groves. When
I see a good amount of juice surfacing, I know this is medium rare, going on medium.
Let it rest a bit. And people say that hanger steak has the beefy flavor of skirt with the
tenderness of tenderloin. That's crazy talk. It's tender, but it's not as tender as tenderloin.
You still need to slice it thin against the grain, and I'm doing it with my knife at a
shallow angle — "on the bias," as they say. That gets you prettier, wider slices, instead
of thin little strips.
I cannot describe how delicious that is. It is so worth the extra butchery work. Quite
tender if the muscle fibers are short, and the wide-open grain structure would be particularly
good at holding onto a nice pan sauce, so let's talk about sauce.
I think there are two reasons pan sauces aren't nearly as popular for steak as they are for
pork and chicken. The first is simply that good beef has a strong flavor and just doesn't
need sauce as much as chicken breast does. But the other reason is that in order to get
a nice sear on a thin steak, you generally have to burn the fond in the pan. Like, that's
burned. I don't want to dissolve that into a sauce. I would taste bad.
But, let's consider these loin-like pieces we cut. These are a lot thicker, and the thicker
the steak, the lower the heat you generally want to use. So we can cook these more gently
and, incidentally, not burn our fond in the process. This is like medium-low heat on my
stove.
I'm just rolling them around frequently until I've got a decent crust built up on the outside,
and then I'll start butter basting. You can go that with a spoon, but I find it works
just as well to simply keep flipping the meat around in the butter. This creates something
like a roasting environment in the pan — omni-directional heat that'll help you cook something thicker
like this through.
Since this is like a little roast more than a steak, I might use a thermometer to judge
doneness, or you can just poke and peak. And if you're gonna do that, scissors are great
— snipping is way easier than trying saw through something with a knife while it's
still in the pan.
Yeah, still quite raw in the center, but one of the flaws of poke-and-peak is that you're
looking at the meat pre-carryover cooking. Remember that the inside will keep cooking
as you let it rest on the board. You see a lot of pink juice pushing out the side on
that big one. I bet that thinner piece is done by now. I'll just give the thicker piece
another minute or so.
I love cutting meat into smaller pieces of relatively uniform size for precisely this
reason. Now, while those rest, some shallots. I chopped these up earlier, nice and fine.
I think shallots are the classic allium for pan sauces in part because the layers are
thin, so the pieces are small and they cook really quickly. Pan sauce has to be quick,
or your meat will go cold.
When those are brown and soft, I'll deglaze with a little red wine. I'm using a wooden
spoon so I can scrape the pan without chipping my seasoning layer. If you don't want to use
wine, I'd suggest water followed by a big splash of balsamic vinegar.
And if you're a lucky duck like me, and you have a couple ice cubes of homemade demi-glace
in the freezer, now is a great time to use them. I have a whole video about this stuff
in the description. I use a modified version of Chef John's method, which uses beef plus
chicken wings to simulate the traditional and much more expensive veal joints.
If your sauce starts to look over-reduced, like this does, consider adding water instead
of more wine. Too much reduced red wine can get pretty bitter. Now I'll simply turn off
the heat, and when the bubbling has all but stopped, I'll stir in some butter. If I didn't
have the demi-glace in there I'd probably compensate by using like twice this much butter.
You mix butter into sauce off the boil, and a thick, luscious emission will form. If the
sauce is really boiling, the butter just separates into water with oil on top. Off the heat while
we carve our little mock tenderloins in to thin medallions. Look how pretty that is.
I'll pour the juices from my board into the sauce — gah, man overboard! Well, I guess
I'll just have to eat that one. I might tear some parsley into this at the last second.
There's enough heat in there to wilt it down bit without it turning brown. And then we
can spoon that right over.
Again, that coarse grain structure of the hanger gives you all these little ridges in
the meat where the sauce can flow. Absolutely delicious. I hope I've given you some courage
to graduate to these slightly more challenging cuts.
They're not always cheaper, thanks to jerks like me popularizing them, but they are so
much more flavorful than the big tender cuts. Give one a try and see for yourself.