There was a very famous chef in ancient China, his amazing is the kung fu of slaughtering cattle, it is said that he can use a knife to cut the beef close to the gap between the bones and bones, and as the body swings the knife forward, the beef and the bones are separated, reaching the point of divine skill.
What is even more rare is that in the process of slaughtering cattle, you can not hurt the blade at all, slaughtering thousands of cows in more than ten years, the blade is still intact, this is the story of Ding Ding xie cattle recorded in "Zhuangzi • Health Lord":
Cu Ding is Wen Huijun's relief of the cattle, the touch of the hand, the place of the shoulder, the foot of the foot, the knee of the knee, the sound of the sword, the sound of the sword, the middle of the sound.
After reading this story, I can't help but think that if you let Cu Ding slaughter the cow, you must be able to cut out the most tender steak, because although there is a lot of meat on the cow, only a small part of the beef with both meat flavor and tenderness is suitable for making steak, let's take a look at it together.
Before talking about the topic of steak, first tell you a childhood memory, remember when I was a child, my mother stewed chicken, my sister would always pick chicken wings to eat, and for me, the meaty chicken breast and chicken thighs are the favorite, every time at this time, the smart mother will laugh and say that my sister will eat more than I will eat.
It turns out that like most birds, the most active parts of chickens are the chest and legs, so the muscle tissue in these two places is also the most developed. Chicken wings, which have basically degenerated rapidly, are due to the small amount of exercise, the muscle tissue is significantly degraded, and the chicken meat coexists with fat.
The cells in the muscle tissue are often very dense and thick, and after cooking, they will have a feeling of firewood, and chicken wings containing fat, even if they are stewed for a long time, will still be very good because of the fat they contain. Where there is less exercise, there is more fat, and where there is a lot of exercise, there is more muscle, which is not only applicable to chickens, but also to most animals.
Even if we people take time to go to the gym, the coach will first recommend that you measure the body fat content before you lose weight, the higher the body fat content, the less exercise is usually exercised, so the fat is piled up to lead to high content. On the contrary, if a person's body fat content is high, it means that the usual amount of exercise is very large, and the whole body is muscle (also known as tendon meat).
However, when Europeans in the Middle Ages just began to eat steak, it was only a small number of aristocrats who could enjoy luxury goods, and things were scarce and expensive, resulting in people at that time not yet reaching the stage of pursuing flavor and taste, but still in the pursuit of quantity, so later European countries bred a Belgian blue cow with muscles all over.
This kind of cattle after continuous artificial breeding, screening out varieties that can not synthesize a protein, and this protein is an indispensable raw material for the synthesis of muscle growth inhibitors, because of the lack of this inhibitor, the Belgian blue cattle from birth began crazy long meat, and all muscle, so it has also become a famous meat cattle breed in Europe, and has been introduced to the United States, Canada and other countries.
With the improvement of people's taste in the united states, on the basis of taste requirements, people have begun to pursue the unique flavor of beef, which requires that the cut steak contains a certain amount of fat. It's not all fat, no fat at all, the amount of fat should be just right, and it is in this context that the island nation of Toei bred The Japanese Wagyu beef that they are proud of, and once the price was inflated.
Wagyu beef meat is juicy and tender, the most characteristic is the red muscle in the even distribution of white fat, because of the shape of snowflakes, also known as snowflake beef, why the pursuit of more extreme taste bud enjoyment, people will also according to the proportion and distribution of "snowflakes", will be beef for a more detailed grade division, roughly the fat distribution of the more uniform the higher the grade.
Human beings began to eat a lot of beef, that is, in the past two or three hundred years, so we will find that in the long-established Chinese food family, there are not many foods with beef as raw materials, which are far less than the pork we often eat. And due to China's backwardness in modern history, most of the food culture is also eating laodi.
On the contrary, the Western food culture in Europe and the United States is almost all developed in the past one or two hundred years, taking steak as an example, although the cooking method is very simple, but the classification and cutting of beef is much more refined, it can be said that it has achieved the point of "no whole cow"
On the Internet to find a lot of beef split charts, but are not ideal, there are Western-style divisions, there are later more Chinese divisions, the purpose of different natural standards are also different, for this reason had to synthesize a few of their own hand-drawn one, you can use as a reference.
Because the limbs of the cow are strong and often active, as the tendon meat on the limbs does not need to be considered, the fascia inside will be hard to make you doubt life, so the steak is mostly to go to the sides of the spine less exercise meat. Sirloin steaks, filet steaks, eye steaks and t-bone steaks divide almost the entire meat near the spine of the cow.
【Meat Eye Steak】Located at the back of the beef breast, next to the ribs of the spine, this part of the beef is fat and lean (there will be the snow pattern mentioned earlier), and the taste and meat taste are very good.
[Sirloin Steak], also known as New Yorker steak or sharon steak, is located in the upper part of the beef fillet (beef tenderloin), the back of the waist of the spine, which is characterized by an outer side of a thick layer of meat tendons (very recognizable), chewy but can not be fried too old, generally three or five minutes cooked can be.
[Filet steak] is what we often call beef fillet, tender meat is the characteristics of tenderness, because it is taken from a whole piece of large muscle tissue, generally only a layer of fascia on the outside, the internal meat tendons are very small, occasionally there will be through the fat, but there will definitely be no meat tendons like beef tendon meat that can be seen everywhere, which is also a way to identify filet steak.
As for the "t-bone steak" (also known as t-shaped steak) it looks like a thing made by the Americans, because whether it is Philippy or Sirloin, it reveals a delicacy of European food culture, and the t-bone steak is a one-size-fits-all smorgasbord of several pieces of beef that are closely next to each other, both a part of the sirloin with meat tendons, and a part of the tender filet, and may also have a small part of the naked eye, a piece of steak three different tastes tasted, and still very violently cut the bones together.
I have to say that it is very American, rough and a little lazy, just like American slang!
With the popularization of steak, the original fine point is very impractical, after all, a cow only has a small piece of meat that can be used to make steak, which is not cost-effective and limits the yield, so the beef cutter in the slaughterhouse will also discover tender meat that can be used to make steak in other parts of the cow, and create a lot of new names.
No matter what kind of tricks, as far as a cow is concerned, it is still the mainstream of the above-mentioned steaks. And if for friends who do not often eat Western food, when they are entangled in how to choose the type of steak, they may wish to choose t-bone steak, and the "smorgasbord" will definitely not be wrong.