August 2002

Hi all. This is the first of what will become a semi-regular newsletter giving you some info on meat and offers on products. I trust that you will forgive me if I ramble a little, but hopefully if you read on you will gain some insights into the various aspects of the meat world and feel more comfortable about the products you eat.

I'm going to start out by answering the most common question that I receive. That is, what is the best steak and what type of options are there? My first experience with the different cuts of beef happened when I was just a toddler and continued on up until just a few years ago. Every year my family kept back a couple steers from the herd for our annual meat supply. We would run down to a neighbor's place and together our families would slaughter two or three head. Leonard, our neighbor, was a meat aficionado, he had a fully equipped butcher shop in his garage, complete with a sausage grinder, a tenderizer, and all the various implements required. We would slaughter about one week before Christmas, then allow the carcasses to hang and age for a couple weeks and then cut everything up around New Year's. Leonard (who was old at the time and is ancient now) somehow always seemed to have an auto parts calendar with a bikini clad girl hanging on the wall of his cutting room, I don't quite understand how he did it, but this calendar was always about five years out of date, but he had a new (old) one every year - I guess he kept some inventory on hand. Now this always happened in December and December in Nebraska is down right cold, so cold in fact that Leonard would insist that the poor girl on his calendar had goosebumps when he first walked in that morning.

Please keep in mind that we were not professional butchers, we were ranchers who cut up meat once a year based upon some 1950's era posters from the USDA. Our goal was to get this beef down to skillet size servings. However we did a pretty good job of making T-bone steaks, round steaks, the occasional Kansas City Strip, and lots of "mystery" steaks which were the result of us being too slow in telling Glendora (Leonard's wife) and my mother, who were doing the packaging, what exactly we were throwing at them. Mistakes were made and these went into the hamburger bin, and boy did we eat a lot of hamburger. Now with this out of the way I am able to answer the first part of the above question, that is, what makes the best steak. The answer is; whatever suits your fancy and if you don't know what to call it, "mystery steak" will do just fine.

However there are some more orthodox ways of creating a steak than what we used to do back in Burwell, Nebraska, and chances are that is what you've run into in supermarkets and restaurants, so I will break it down a little bit. There are basically four main steak cuts that come from beef, those are:

1. The fillet mignon. Also called the chateaubriand, the difference is the size, fillets are smaller. I call all of my steaks from this cut fillet mignon, even the big ones, because it is much easier to spell. This steak comes from a cut called the tenderloin which, as the name suggests, is the tenderest cut of beef. The meat is lightly marbled but is considered the "King" of steaks.
2. The "Kansas City" or "New York" strip. The difference depends entirely upon your location; they are the same cut of beef. This comes from the striploin and is a fairly well marbled cut with a border of fat along one side. Perhaps the best steak for cooking on the grill. FYI - a T-bone or a Porterhouse consists of a fillet mignon and a strip steak with the bone (shaped like a "T") that separates the two cuts.
3. The ribeye steak. A ribeye is normally cooked as a roast and then called "Prime Rib" when you cut it into a steak you get a steak that is heavily marbled with a large seam of marbling running right through the center. It is one of the most flavorful steaks you can have.
4. The top sirloin. Also known as the top butt, round, or rump steak - you can see why I favor the name "top sirloin". This can also be found on menus as a London broil. This is great cut of meat with a really full flavor. However it is not as tender as the cuts mentioned above. While this is one of my favorite cuts, I don't sell it as a steak here in Japan because tenderness is an issue. However I do take this cut and make cubes which are great for stir fry, stews, and especially, shish-ka-bobs.

You might think that we are almost done, but there is one more thing that you need to know, and that is how to tell if your steak is going to taste good. There is only one visual characteristic that can be used to determine the tastiness of beef, and that characteristic is marbling. Marbling in the amount of fat that is inside the meat, it is those flecks or seams of white that are speckled throughout a steak. The more marbling, the better the taste, in the US we have a quality grade system to label this aspect. The scale is Prime, Choice, Select, Standard, etc... Prime is of course the best. Only 2 % of all US beef is graded Prime.

The next sentence is going to blow you away and you will probably call me a liar, you won't be the first. Meat that is heavily marbled does not increase your cholesterol any more than beef that is lean. I'll keep it simple here but if any of you want to check me out I'll explain further and point you towards documentation if you want. The fat that is within the meat (marbling) on beef and the fat that surrounds the meat (we call it "bark") are two different types, the marbling is not so bad for you, the bark is. So you don't have to eat tough, tasteless beef to feel healthy. That said, all of my US beef is USDA Prime - the very best stuff, you would not be able to buy this in a US supermarket if you wanted to - and all of my Aussie beef is long-grain fed which compares nicely to USDA Choice.

That's all for now.

-jason