Pro Butcher Cuts 7 Steaks Not Sold In Supermarkets

Oh, boy, here we go.

[upbeat music]

Sorry about the sound effects.

Hi, my name is Lena Diaz

and I've been a whole animal butcher for 12 years.

Today I'm going to show you secret cuts of beef

that you almost never see in a supermarket.

[hip music]

All right, I need to sit down.

At a whole animal butcher shop you will find cuts

that are not just your New York strip, your rib eye,

your beef tenderloin.

We try to utilize the entire steer.

These cuts that I'm gonna show you today have great texture.

They're full of flavor, and in many cases

they are less expensive than your higher end cuts.

When a steer arrives a butcher shop

it doesn't come in one whole piece.

It oftentimes comes in many separate pieces.

We're going to be looking at cuts

in the loin/sirloin area, and the chuck area.

These are referred to as primal cuts.

[upbeat music]

Since this section doesn't get much exercise

these cuts are more tender than other muscles

that you may find in other parts of the steer.

The first thing I'm gonna show you today is

the sirloin flap.

Also known as the Bavette.

I found many years ago that sirloin flap meat

wasn't something that was selling.

I did change the name to Bavette

and found quite a bit of success moving it

with a more sophisticated French name.

[Lena laughs]

Sorry.

You don't need much to break down a whole animal.

You do need a good boning knife and oftentimes a hand saw.

So the first thing I'm going to do is

I'm just gonna cut a little bit this fat

to release the flank and just give me some more room.

There's a lot of fat on this part of the steer.

As we're cutting, what we're trying to do is

like cut between the seams.

The seams often tell you where to cut.

So here you'll have the flank steak,

Below the flank, it's just all fat.

There's a large amount of suet here.

[Lena grunts] [fat rips]

Ahh.

Just above the sirloin flap, there's another muscle

that rests above it that we have to like separate

that's very sinewy.

Under here is where we have the Bavette

which I'm gonna clean right now.

All right.

So I am no longer like boning things out.

For presentation or for like cleaning stuff up

I prefer using a long knife, so you have longer strokes.

I refer to this knife as a scimitar.

So I'm just removing all of this like silver skin,

which is really tough, it's not edible.

It's not something you would want.

Silver skin is something that you find

in between all of the muscles.

It's kind of like the natural seams.

The texture of the Bavette is very similar to a skirt steak.

I love the steak. I like it.

I feel like it's has more flavor.

It's meatier.

Here we have the Bavette.

[scale beeps and brrhs]

It's very long. It's thin.

It has a very accordion type texture to it.

This weighs more than a skirt steak.

It is often cheaper than your skirt steak

but I find that it has more flavor.

This is a great cut for grilling or pan searing.

It does take really well to marinades.

I often tell people that if this doesn't obviously fit

in their pan or when they're grilling it,

to maybe cut it in half or into three pieces.

And then you can cut it against the grain,

and it's also known as Sirloin tips when it's cut that way.

This is one of my favorite cuts,

you may not see this at the supermarket

but you will definitely see this at your local butcher shop.

We have the loin and we have the sirloin,

I'm going to saw in between the loin and the sirloin area.

And then underneath the sirloin

I'm going to show you some of my favorite cuts.

So the sirloin section is, if you can imagine,

it's just like your lower back

right before it meets the round.

It's almost this love section that you've got right here.

So the first cut, I'm going to show you out of the sirloin

is the picanha which the most popular steak

you'll find in Brazil,

but you will very rarely find it in an American supermarket.

So before we can expose the picanha,

we need to remove some of the more common cuts.

All right.

So here we have the H bone attached to the sirloin.

This part here's a, the tri tip.

It's a tri tip, right?

Because it's like a triangle one, two, three sides.

Great cut for smoking, or grilling.

This is the picanha up here.

I'm removing the fat to like kind of see where my seams are.

This fat basically is what's separating my picanha

from my sirloin filet and my top sirloin.

The picanha is very similar to the New York strip

in the sense that it has a really nice fat cap

that you see right here.

I'm gonna trim a little bit of the fat off the top.

Oftentimes, most customers just really don't wanna buy

that much fat.

So here we have the picanha.

[scale beeps and brrhs] I think this is a great cut of meat.

Aesthetically and everything, the fat cap and the texture,

I just think it's a great alternative to New York strips

without paying the New York strip price.

It's like a tighter grain than like a skirt steak

or a Bavette.

So if you were to take the steak home

and you don't have the possibility of grilling it

I would say sear it fat side down.

I often don't go too high because the fat's going to burn.

What I'm trying to do is render the fat,

therefore you don't have to use any high temp oils.

You can just cook it in its own fat.

If you've ever been to a Brazilian, all you can eat,

barbecue grill restaurant,

oftentimes you'll find the picanha that's been skewered.

It's kind of like this half moon shaped steak

with the really beautiful fat cap.

I'm gonna cut this into steaks for you.

I generally like to do a thick steak

at least an inch and a half.

It looks very similar to a New York strip

and maybe a little bit thinner.

You can generally get four really decent sized picanhas

from that muscle.

It has really beautiful marbling.

It's got a really beautiful fat cap.

If I had to put my sirloins cuts in order of favorite,

picanha/culotte is my favorite sirloin cut.

Here we have the remainder of the sirloin.

Sometimes you're going to see the sirloin steak

in the supermarket, but the sirloin steak

in the supermarket comprises of three different muscles

which have very different textures.

But now we're gonna separate the top sirloin

from the sirloin filet.

Sirloin filet is very comparable to beef tenderloin.

It is much cheaper.

It has much more flavor than beef tenderloin.

This is just a really comparable cut.

There's a little bit of like silver skin.

That's not edible.

I am just going to come under here

and I'm gonna release all of this fat

and expose the muscle which also will let me see

where the muscles separate, right?

There's like a line coming out here right now.

This is where the sirloin filet is going to separate itself

from the top sirloin.

Here we have have the sirloin filet,

[scale beeps and brrhs]

doesn't have a lot of intramuscular fat.

It generally can feed at least four to five people.

It probably weighs somewhere around twoish pounds,

generally.

It makes a beautiful roast just like a filet mignon

or beef tenderloin.

The sirloin filet is one of my favorite cuts too,

as you know, I love sirloins.

Here we have the top sirloin.

[scale beeps and brrhs]

This is a great alternative to rib eye.

It has a little bit more intramuscular fat

than the sirloin filet does,

if somebody wanted a rib eye

but it's just something that they can't afford,

I'll slice them off a piece of the top sirloin.

Makes beautiful steaks but it also makes a beautiful roast,

Just as a sirloin filet, full of flavor and tender as well.

We're just gonna put this all together

so you see what this looks like.

The picanha rests on top of the sirloin filet

and the top sirloin.

In the supermarkets,

you would've found a very like boxy rectangular cut

which would've been a composition of all three cuts.

Some of my favorite cuts come out of the loin.

Bavette, top sirloin, sirloin filet, your picanha.

These steaks have a lot of flavor, they are tender

and they are not as expensive

as your New York strip, rib eyes or beef tenderloin.

The next primal we'll be working on is the chuck.

It's a bit heavy, so I'm gonna have someone give me a hand

and put this on the table.

[hook clatters]

So the chuck is also known as the shoulder area.

So because of all its exercise

these cuts are a little bit more worked.

There's a little bit more connective tissue

but they are full of flavor.

A lot of your traditional stewing cuts

come out of the chuck, but the chuck has some amazing

secret cuts that you might not have heard of.

And I'd like to show them to you.

The next cut, I'm going to show you is a teres major.

Some stores will refer to as the petite filet,

the faux filet, shoulder tender.

It goes by a lot of names.

Before I get there, I've gotta do a lot.

The first thing I'm gonna do is remove the foreshank.

I'm coming behind the elbow, I have to put my body weight

in to to help me take this foreshank off.

And now I am going to flip the steer around.

This is the chuck plate.

This is where, see the neck,

down here you have the brisket, here we have your sternum.

So what I'm going to do is

I'm going to remove some of this chain meat

that we have here.

What I'm going to do right now,

is saw along my neck bone here.

And I'm just gonna saw until I hear

that the chuck ribs just cracked.

[Lena sighs] Okay. All right.

I need to sit down.

Okay.

And I'm just gonna gingerly cut through here

to the next seam,

making sure I don't cut any other muscles below.

And now I'm gonna come around the sternum,

the breast plate, and like connect the dots.

So now I'm gonna pull back the chuck plate.

So here we have bone-in chuck rib.

I'm gonna remove the brisket.

The brisket is a very, very large muscle.

So here we have the brisket, the underside of the brisket

and I'm just releasing these neck bones.

[Lena grunts]

Come on, come on.

All right.

So this is the neck bones.

It's like really cold in this cutting room right now.

So all the fat's like super hard

and it's much easier to cut through stuff

when it's a little bit warmer.

Do you guys get paid more for working in a cool fridge?

No, just kidding.

[laughter]

No? No, that's not that's not how that works?

I'm just, again, seaming it all out.

The teres major's one of the more tender cuts in this steer,

it's a very small muscle.

It's a cut that is a great alternative to the filet mignon.

We're trying to remove

as much of the silver skin as possible.

So here we have the teres major.

[scale beeps and brrhs]

This is the cut that people come back for all the time.

Since it's referred to as like the petite filet

or the faux filet, some people may think

that this is like a smaller version of a filet mignon.

It is not.

Catering companies tend to use the faux filet

to reduce cost on banquets or events.

This muscle is great pan-seared or grilled.

I would do high temp, quick, like a hard, fast sear.

And it's really a muscle that you can cook past medium,

or medium well, and it won't become tough

as some other cuts do.

And this is half the price of your traditional filet mignon,

beef tenderloin.

So the next cut I'm going to do is the palomilla.

It's referred to in Las Vegas as the Las Vegas strip.

It's a bottom blade of the shoulder,

a really easy, great weekday steak, really lean.

So I'm just rolling back this very, very large chuck roll.

Just trying to like break things at the seam.

Ooh.

All right.

So now this is known as the clad, under here

is what's known as the chuck tender,

there is nothing tender about it which is the funniest part.

I often feel like they named it that just

so that they could move it,

because there really isn't anything tender

about the chuck tender.

Right below here, this is your rotary cuff.

And the palomilla basically starts

where the rotary cuff starts

and then works itself all the way down

to the end of the shoulder blade.

So now I'm just pulling this off.

This is the bottom part of the shoulder blade.

And here we have the palomilla.

[scale beeps and brrhs]

This is like a great lean steak, really easy to cook.

It's not something that you see very often

but it's really easy to sear up.

It's really quick.

It doesn't have a texture like your skirt steak.

It doesn't have that accordion texture,

it doesn't have those loose fibers.

This is a really high temp, quick, hard, fast sear.

We can do some really great stir fries with this.

This on the price scale, it's gonna be somewhere

in your like mid to high teens, cheaper than the faux filet.

It's just a great, easy steak

that I only see at small butcher shops.

So the next cut I'm going to show you is the platanillo

which happens to be the bicep of the steer.

It's referred to as the platanillo

and it looks like a plantain.

I was telling somebody, I grew up attending a lot

of Cantonese style banquets in my life.

And the first plate served to you,

at a Cantonese wedding banquet, is cold meats.

And on this dish,

you can find these round pieces of beef

that are sliced really thin

and it comes out of this muscle right here.

I'm just gonna clean this all off, but as you can see

it has a huge piece of tendon here.

If cooked properly, tendon can be really delicate,

it can be really tender.

What I also love about this cut is

that you can braze it whole.

If I were to cook this whole and then slice it,

it plates up very well.

[scale beeps and brrhs]

It needs a little bit more love.

It needs to be cooked low and slow.

You can serve at room temperature,

can then be sliced really thin

and be enjoyed as a deli meat almost.

It's probably one of the cheaper cuts in a butcher case.

Just because it's a cheaper cut in the case,

doesn't mean that it's not tasty, that it can't be tender.

I can't get enough of how much I really enjoy this.

There are a lot of tender cuts in your chuck,

ask your butcher and I'm sure they'll hook you up.

There are so many unfamiliar cuts out there.

I really advise you to get out there and try something new,

go to your butcher shop and ask them

to make a recommendation.

Ask them to recommend something

that you may not be familiar with

and just try something different.