by Dave ScantlandCows seem so simple. Placid, ruminant, not too smart. But some parts of them
defy sense -- or maybe it's our approach to them that's out of whack.
Check off a few primals: round, sirloin, short loin, plate, flank, chuck . . .
as we used to say on Sesame Street, one of these things is not like the others.
From the rib, you get two, maybe three cuts, with a couple of minor variations:
the rib steak (bone in or out), the deckle (an overlooked and delicious cut) and
back ribs. The plate gives up short ribs and well, plate. The flank is eponymous,
and the round is a large rough globe of homogenous tissue, most of it tasteless.
But the chuck: it's a bundle of criss-crossing muscles that makes an Atlanta
highway cloverleaf look like the simplest of Euclid's shapes -- the 3-D chess
of ungulate physiology. For the most part, we ignore that. Parse a seven-bone
roast -- the ne plus ultra of chuckery -- and you'll note that it might as well
be called the seven-muscle roast. The chuck is synonymous with shoulder; if
you palpate your own blades, you'll grasp my point: you got a delt, a pec, the
start of the bicep, and even a lat. All those muscles hang off of a poem of
serious bones: scapula, clavicle, sternum; humerus, vertebra, rib. A cow is
no less complicated.
The chuck deserves more respect. Unlike its primal siblings, it doesn't yield
self-similar Mandelbrot-like miniatures of the whole. Given a whole chuck, a
butcher will slice a few arm steaks from the bottom, then flip it 90 degrees
and cut a bunch of roasts in parallel, transecting the muscles with band-saw
abandon: seven-bones, chucks, boneless amalgams. And why not? It's efficient
and it makes tasty pot roasts. It's what happens to chuck.
Here's why not: we deny the complexity of chuck, and in doing so we sacrifice
the potential of giving each muscle its due.
This is changing. In 2002, the University of Nebraska and University of Florida,
funded by the Cattlemen's Beef Board, profiled the entire musculature of the
cow, searching for underutilized cuts. One discovery was the flatiron steak,
fabricated by splitting a blade roast along a nasty stripe of connective tissue.
You can only take this so far, though. Some muscles are too small or too oddly
shaped to be useful, or can't be easily separated; some go together well enough
in terms of tenderness or marbling that it's worth taking them as a group.
The chuck-eye steak, for example. It's a cluster of four muscles that stretch
from the shoulder into the rib primal (two of them -- longissimus dorsi and
multifidous dorsi -- go even further . They make up the bulk of the strip steak.)
Unlike the larger limb muscles of what's called the shoulder clod, these
don't do heavy lifting. They move the spine and perhaps assist in breathing;
the toughest job is done by the complexus, which extends the head and neck.
In other words, as chuck muscles go, the chuck-eye group has it easy. Maybe
this accounts for its relative tenderness (although the flatiron, widely recognized
as the second most tender cut on the whole animal, moves the cow's arm in and
out, and acts like a ligament, connecting other muscles to the shoulder blade.
Sounds like hard work to me).
Chuck-eyes packages are often labeled as the "poor-man's ribeye,"
and it's a claim more valid than many a marketeer's promise, since some
of the same musculature is involved. In a few ways, the chuck-eye is a more
valuable cut: it's cheaper, it's just as flavorful, and it survives overcooking
better than anything you'll find in the rib or the short loin. An overcooked
rib steak is moist, mealy sawdust in your mouth; a well-done chuck-eye just
gets nicely chewy and remains beefy.
That's not to say that the chuck-eye doesn't present some problems. The muscle
group is held together by the thinnest of tissue that begins to disintegrate
as soon as it hits the heat. Depending on where in the length of the chuck-eye
roll the steak came from, it might be bound on one side by a strap of tough
sheathing. You can put them on the grill or under the broiler, but the density
of the meat makes this a less-than-ideal -- though still appealing -- application.
 Behold the chuck-eye Click to enlarge | In fact, the grill used to be my preferred method. But that was before a hot (don't turn on the oven) rainy (grilling is out) Atlanta night when the only protein in the house was chuck-eye. As I salted the steaks, I thought, "Fine -- let's treat this poor man's steak like a rich man's indulgence. Let's treat it the way, say, Alain Ducasse would treat it. " The Ducasse method browns the steak, then turns down the heat and applies liberal -- frightening -- amounts of butter, spooned over the lazily browning beef. Ducasse has his steaks cut thick, requiring oven treatment. It's rare (pardon the pun) to find a chuck-eye cut more than an inch thick, so it made sense to stay on the stovetop. I got out my Gray Kunz sauce spoon, a cast-iron skillet and a stick of unsalted Land o' Lakes. Cooked over medium heat, the steak was terrific: crusty and cooked just to the pink side of medium, where the cut's taste and texture are best. Triumphant, I pinged a friend to brag about my application of haute technique to lowly chuck. The computer fan whirred as he typed his response. "Um," he said. "That's not Ducasse. I believe that's more accurately called 'the Colicchio Method.'" I was somewhere around the age of 11 when I came to realize that the world of acting wasn't the sole province of Adam West and Dick Van Dyke (there were these British dudes Richard and Laurence) and music meant more than the Beatles, the Beach Boys and the Monkees (Bob Dylan -- who's he?) In an afternoon, I metamorphosed from comic book aficionado at Jerry Marks's drug store to leafer of Life magazine. Though my world got bigger, so great was my ignorance that five years later I was still lagging. At the first practice of a band I joined in 1972, the guitarists alternated between figuring out where to find a bass player and tossing song ideas back and forth while I practiced paradiddles. It was like watching Olivier act without speaking: my comprehension of anything was dim. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young -- law firm? Alice Cooper -- who's she? That's how it was discovering Tom Colicchio. It's not like I'd never heard of him, but he just wasn't in my circle of cooking friends -- the people whose advice I seek through cookbooks and whose approval I imagine when a dish turns out well. I uncovered Colicchio's Steak with Potatoes on the Esquire web site, where he deals with hanger (another very forgiving steak cut) in what I would find out was a typical straightforward-but-comprehensive Colicchio way, balancing the rich beef with bacon, onions and vinegar. Further investigations into his excellent Think Like a Chef revealed a kindred spirit. It's not that I don't enjoy excursions into other realms, but I always return to what Tom espouses: "intense, but honest and unaffected," "cooking is a craft best learned through observation and practice," "of course you're going to want to alter the recipe!" and the all-important, "I like butter. Butter is good." Even when I indulge in molecular gastronomy, there's no point unless it looks good, tastes good and can at least approach -- with practice -- lots of practice, usually -- excellence. Because I'd made my discovery backwards, I didn't hear the same approval that I usually do (maybe Prudhomme's lusty hurrah or Bertolli's calm smile). In excitement and obsequiousness, I sent a note: Hi, Tom -- Tom is a busy guy. I'm still waiting on a reply, but I like to think that he would approve of: If Colicchio Cooked a Chuck-eye 2 one-inch-thick chuck-eye steaks Salt 2-3 T peanut or grapeseed oil Unsalted butter
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  Tie it up Click to enlarge | |
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 Salt it; let it rest Click to enlarge | |
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 Brown it all over Click to enlarge | |
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 Let it rest again . . . Click to enlarge | |
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 . . . while you prepare its bath Click to enlarge | |
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 Baste without pause Click to enlarge | |
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| Enjoy! Click to enlarge | |
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Dave Scantland (aka Dave the Cook) is an Atlanta-based writer, graphic designer and cooking teacher. He is also director of operations for the eGullet Society for Culinary Arts & Letters.
