I’m not much of a meat eater and have at times gone a year or more without a steak.
Last summer, I bought a stupidly expensive rib-eye ($19.99/lb) steak at a high-end grocery store and it was so freaking good that I’ve made it a monthly tradition since. I sometimes opt for the marginally cheaper T-bone, but my steak consumption is up 1000 percent nowadays. (Still only about once a month.)
I haven’t tried any of the cheaper steaks - I look for spendy ones with lots of marbling and bone. Are there cheaper steaks that would taste as good, if cooked differently? I do basic steak au poivre, rare, with the spendy steaks.
In a word, yes*. We don’t eat steak all that often, but when we do, it’s a good, tender, tasty, expensive cut (mostly because I don’t want to spend two hours doggedly chewing on a cheap cut).
I get my beef through my farm share from a farm where the cattle are pastured. The difference in taste between it and supermarket beef is remarkable. Even the ground beef is delicious. Because of the superior taste and texture I’m usually very satisfied with cheaper cuts (I like the Santa Maria/California tri-tip, although it isn’t a very thick steak).
Amazingly, it isn’t more expensive than the supermarket (their bone-in ribeye is $14.99/lb). If you have a local farmer’s market there might be a beef seller you could try.
Keep an eye out for grass-fed, free-range beef; it won’t have the marbling that you’ve been looking for, but it will probably taste at least as good. Not sure how expensive it’ll be in your area, but here in organic hippie-land, good cuts of beef start at around $8 a pound. I’ve seen $20-30 at expensive stores and have just decided I’m not going to get used to spending that much for meat.
Yep there’s a local (more than one) grass-fed, free-range local beef place that sells shares in beef cattle, but really I eat so little meat it probably wouldn’t be worth it.
Damn. I’m sort of craving a good steak right about now.
There’s a lot of CHOICE cuts floating around the supermarkets hereabouts. That’s something I don’t remember from the 80’s & early 90’s when I worked at the meat department of a local store, and most everything was prime. “PRIME is what you want to look for,” said one of the meatcutters, “I wouldn’t bother with a choice cut.” Judging from recent experience, yeah, I’m not buying any more of those “choice” steaks. I’d rather have a hamburger then chew that shoeleather.
I think the more expensive, pastured, grass-fed beef is absolutely worth the money. I buy from a local farmer and it’s usually $8/lb for ground and if I splurge on steaks it’s anywhere from $10/lb for skirt steak to $15 to $20 for ribeye (my favorite).
For me, it’s not just that it’s local, not just that it’s a small farm that sells a cow at a time. It’s the whole thing about local and sustainable farming, and the meat is healthier. The omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acid imbalance found in factory farmed cattle is reversed in grass-fed pastured cattle. I can’t get behind eating meat that’s essentially from sick animals, that are made fat quickly with non-ruminant feed and given antibiotics mixed into it.
So, I suck it up and buy spendy meat when I feel the need to indulge. I also really enjoy a pastured pork loin roast every couple of months. There’s one in the freezer right now, can’t wait for a day soon with time to slow roast it!
I buy expensive meat because it’s better. Most of the beef sold at groceries has been raised for minimum cost, highest yield, and it’s flavorless and lacks good texture. It’s also been wet packed so that you buy blood, which is mostly water for the price of beef. Even my local butcher has to charge more to cover the losses from drying the prime cuts he uses. Sometimes you can get closer to the source and get better quality for a lower price, but for a steady supply of known quality I spend the bucks.
Most cheap steaks aren’t worth cooking or eating. I will use round steak to make chicken fried steak, but I pound it into submission. Chuck is a very flavorful cut, but it’s better as a pot roast or as ground beef than as a steak.
That is a high end steak house price. My local butcher sells Dry Aged whole NY Strip Loins for $13.99/lb. Average is around 11 lbs so you are looking at $154. Say you lose 1.5 lbs in trim and you are left with 9.5 lbs of dry aged steaks. You can get 10 just under a pound dry aged NY steaks for $154 so that is only $15.40 per steak.
(That price was as of the end of November so it could be slightly higher, but not up to $68 to $99/lb to reach the $75-$100 per steak mark)
I think that the general answer to the question “Is really expensive X worth the money” for almost any product (wine/whiskey/beef/etc) is going to be:
There is a dramatic and obvious increase in quality going from the cheapest versions of X to the mid-price. As the price continues to increase the incremental increase in quality gets smaller and smaller, and becomes less and less apparent. The difference between *very *high end and *extremely *high end is usually so small as to be unnoticeable; at that point the difference might be purely marketing/snobbery.
However, if you have been consuming the cheapest possible X by all means splurge and try a higher price point.
Ribeyes are my absolute favorite, but I’ve been eating chuck eye steaks recently- about $5 per pound. I find them nicely marbled and flavorful. I marinate them for about an hour or two (make your own marinade- I mix fish sauce, soy sauce, worcestershire sauce, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and red wine), then broil it in the oven for about 4 minutes per side, and that’s it. Very tasty.
The only cuts of steak worth grilling and eating “as they come” are filet, new york strip, ribeye, t-bone and its big brother porterhouse. The cheaper cuts are tough, tasteless or both and (as others have noted) are better for marinating, slicing, shredding etc.
I don’t care for ribeye myself - just too fatty - but I will go for any of the others any time I can get them. Prime restaurant-grade cuts are a special treat and better than most Choice cuts, but if you select your steak carefully there’s not much difference between the two. You can get good prices on very good cuts if you know what to look for and wait for sales.
Another cut I recommend very highly is tri-tip: until I moved to the northeast I hadn’t realized that it was an extremely regional item, found almost exclusively in the greater Northern California area and a few places in Texas. A big tri-tip roast, grilled slowly in a basket, slices into some of the tastiest and tenderest cow this side of a prime filet. Tri-tips are almost impossible to get, though, outside of those areas; my local butcher can get them, but only sliced into flank-like strips that are very difficult to cook well. Seems like cows have the same parts everywhere but with no market for the cut, tri-tip goes into premium ground. What a waste! As for cost, we used to buy it at Sam’s Club for around $5-6 a pound; when I can get it here, it’s small and $9-15. Not much I miss about California, but that one’s high on the list.
I always thought steak in fine steakhouse was better because of how they cooked it. No matter how hard I tried, I could never replicate it at home. Then I bought a really expensive steak at the store and grilled it up. It was just as good as the steakhouse. Then I realized it’s not that the steakhouse is cooking it so much better, it’s that they have access to the best cuts of meat. Now it seems silly to pay so much for a steak at a restaurant when I know I’m paying them to just heat it up. If I’m going to pay such a premium for my meal, I want to know that I’m paying for the skill of the chef in combining the best ingredients and technique vs throwing it on the grill for X minutes.
This has been my experience as well. It’s almost always worth the price difference to get at least the mid-price item. However, in a lot of cases, I can’t tell the difference between very high end and extremely high end. I can go into a restaurant, and tell the difference in the service, the atmosphere, etc., but I don’t drink enough alcohol to be able to really taste the difference between the Finest Wine and the Pretty Good wine. But at a really good restaurant, I can say “I don’t know much about wine, but I prefer drier wines, and I’m having the lamb. Can you suggest something?” And the server will recommend something, I’ll accept it, and I’ve always enjoyed the wine.
It’s possible to pay too much for what you get, but you’ll rarely get a good item at a low price.
Sometimes it is; expertise does pay off. But mainly, good steakhouses do two things that consumers often don’t: bring the meat to counter temperature before cooking, and use an EXTREMELY hot grill.
Trying to cook a thick slab of cow at 35-40 degrees is going to guarantee overcooked surface, gray overcooking well into the bulk, and a red center. If you don’t get your meat vacu-sealed by a butcher, put it in a tightly zipped ziplock bag, press out all the air, and put it in warm water about a half hour before grilling. When the meat and water stabilize at about 65-70 degrees, grill immediately. (You don’t want meat to sit at any temp above about 50 very long.) You’ll get much more consistent cooking with a great crust, minimal gray, and (with some practice and learning) exactly the interior finish you want.
Most home and backyard grills are nowhere near the temp of a restaurant grill. If you’re a huge beef fan, you acquire a superhot grill; if you’re a normal person, you learn to cook a little differently from Ivan down at Steaks-R-Us.
A little over generalized, but it is the rib and loin that provide the tender cuts. The strip is a loin cut, as is the tri-tip. The top round is also quite good, lean like filet, but not quite as tender.