Taking a look at new cuts

Meat scientists are taking another look at beef carcasses and finding some great products hidden in cuts that are usually ground or roasted. “We’ve got some fantastic products that historically we’ve been grinding or putting in pot roast,” said Jim Ethridge, director of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association’s beef innovation group. He demonstrated some of those new cuts during a talk at the Idaho Cattle Association’s annual meeting. For decades restaurant chefs and home cooks alike have been taught that if a cut of beef comes from the shoulder or the rump, it’s a locomotion muscle and it must be cooked slowly and with liquid to make it edible. But a muscle profiling study that began in 1998, not only identified 39 individual muscles in the chuck and round but also outlined the attributes of each of those muscles. Even more surprisingly, 7 of the 10 most tender cuts on a beef carcass are found in the chuck or round. Suddenly, instead of having a huge chuck roll that can only be made into a pot roast, new products such as the Denver steak can be harvested and featured on a restaurant menu. The Denver steak is considered the fourth most tender cut of beef...more