You can turn almost any cut of beef into a tasty serving, but I find most of the sirloin and round cuts rather tasteless by themselves. Unless you’re going to do something fancier than simple grilling, I’d defend my list as the ones worth eating “nekkid.”
I’m in DC and get it all the time at Costco for about $6.99 a pound. I didn’t realize that it was that hard to get. I like tri-tips for steaks since they are cheaper than ribeyes and to me they taste better.
Yes and no. While there is good expensive steak, there is also waste of money expensive steak.
My general rule of thumb is “If it’s corn fed, it’s a waste of money, because while it may be tender, it will have absolutely no flavor profile to speak of.” Corn fed steak is just boring. And it’s what a LOT of expensive steakhouses serve, making it, essentially, a waste of money.
If you can find a nice grass fed cut, there’s a lot more potential there.
And of course you can “jazz up” almost any cut of meat, but in that case once you get above the bare minimum for tenderness, I don’t think it’s worth paying any sort of premium.
There’s a sort of cult of steak in this country, and most people who sing its praises have problems with strong tastes. 
And like a lot of things food related, there are a lot of people who disagree with you. You will never find a USDA Prime steak that is grass fed… they just don’t get to the marbling state required. Also, due to the leaner nature of grass fed it is more difficult to cook properly… it is easy to over cook and many people describe it as “chewy” even when properly cooked.
I’m not saying I don’t like grass fed… just that all corn fed (actually finished… all cattle are grass fed for the first 6-12 months) isn’t automatically a bad thing. Cooking Light did a good blind comparison on a variety of different NY strips seared and served medium rare… there was no discernible difference between grass and corn fed to the tasters.
I personally will take a corn finished prime dry aged NY strip over your grass fed version any day. YMMV but your rule isn’t universally accepted.
I agree that corn feeding produces excellent beef; I suppose idea range-feeding would produce a more distinctive taste but in my understanding it tends to vary.
The only evidence I have is that California venison, where deer live on rather bitter tree forage, is not all that tasty to me… but when a friend brought 20 pounds of fresh venison from Minnesota, where the deer live on his grain fields (grumble grumble BANG that’ll teach you), it was indescribably delicious.
I do also agree that there’s an upper limit - while I’ve had and liked extremely premium beef like Kobe and the US equivalent, it’s not really any amount better than usual good restaurant cuts when cost is considered. I suppose there are people who can appreciate it the way some can appreciate a $1k bottle of wine, but I’d bet most aficionados would be hard-pressed to tell, say, hand-selected Prime at $20 a pound from Kobe at $50 or more.
I had no clue it was a rarity anywhere. I need to look further afield (well, not the local ranchers’s fields…) to see if it’s available anywhere up here. I know that when I ask, the butcher invariably says some combination of “No; tried but no market; you’re from California, aren’t you?”
So imagine how good real wagyu beef would taste!
ETA actual question: so if you don’t have the confidence, tools, or knowledge to cook a steak well yourself, then are really expensive steaks worth it?
Hmm. I don’t see a connection between having a fine enough palate to appreciate premium beef, and being able to perfectly prepare it. Certainly one would lead to the other in many cases, but only by convenience and coincidence, not necessity.
My own ETA: Assuming you mean eating the premium stuff in restaurants. Certainly if you’re a mediocre cook you shouldn’t be messing with exceptionally pricey cuts; you’ll just get second-rate results with first-rate materials.
Absolutely… someone with the confidence, tools, and knowledge can turn a cheap steak into something wonderful. Someone without these skills can turn them into leather. Someone with the confidence, tools, and knowledge can turn a great steak into something incredible. Someone without would have a harder time screwing up a good piece of meat (over cooking being the most common) and it will still be edible.
You should try a “dry aged” steak at least once in your life, just to see what the fuss is about, and to see if you really like it. My knee-jerk reaction was “They are cleaning out the fridge, and trying to get rid of stuff that is about to spoil.” 
Yeah, but the thing is, if you’re spending that much on a piece of meat, is it really worth it to settle for “edible”?
CHOICE is the second highest grade of beef with PRIME being the highest. I live in the Midwest and have never had a bad CHOICE steak. The biggest problem with CHOICE is that it has a wide range of fat content as it accounts for slightly more than 50% of processed beef where Prime is in the upper 3%. I inspect my CHOICE ribeyes for marbling to help my selection process.
I suspect that you’ve either had the lower sub grades of CHOICE or your grocer was cheating and selling SELECT (third grade) cuts as choice.
The graders actually look at the fat marbling on a ribeye by making a cut on the carcass and judging the marbling at that point to grade the whole carcass. If I remember correctly its the 7th rib.
One thing my butcher told me is that grading is based on bulk orders and is performed using a “good or better” system. So a processing plant that sells sides of beef will keep track of its PRIME/CHOICE/SELECT completions each day and as the quotas of the highest grade is met they will set aside that stamp.
So after the quota of PRIME orders are met any remaining PRIME grade sides could get labeled as CHOICE but not vice-versa. The same with CHOICE getting labeled as SELECT after CHOICE quotas are met. That way the wholesale buyers of the meat will get at least a side as good as their request if not better.
That’s why your local grocer may have a SELECT steak in the case this week that is absolutely wonderful and his SELECT meat the following week is like leather.
My belief is that the answer is: “Yes” but with an asterisk. I believe in the law of diminishing returns on the price of a good steak.
To me it’s like this, and I’m more or less making up number, but you’ll get my drift…
Is a $20 steak twice as good as a $10 steak? Possibly and probably.
Is a $100 steak twice as good as a $50 steak? Personally I don’t think so. It’s definitely better; but not $50 better IMHO.
So from I would say; try different varieties and cuts and variations on how the steak is prepared, etc. It’s a sliding scale and everyone’s tipping point is different.
I’ve heard people say that steak is steak; and it’s all in how it’s prepared. I don’t buy into that. How the beef was raised is definitely important. I offer this (in my mind it’s somewhat related): Where I grew up in Oklahoma, one of the huge agri businesses that supported our town was an farm and alfalfa cubing plant whose sole purpose was to create quality alfalfa cubes to feed to their dairy cows to produce a better than average quality of milk for their dairy products (I’m talking about Braum’s Ice Cream and Dairy Stores. What goes in, must come out either in the dairy or the beef.
Steak isn’t actually all that tough to cook. The two (extremely simple) tricks I recently learned that vastly improved my steaks are 1) let it sit out for an hour or so to come to room temp, as mentioned above; this makes it easier to cook evenly, and 2) start the steak off for 10 or so minutes in a fairly low oven (275 degrees IIRC) to very evenly cook the interior, and then finish it off with a minute or so each side at high heat on a grill or stove top to char the outside. Combine that with a good prime steak, and POW! That is some good eatin’.
This is true, but truthfully, I don’t think the whole “marbling” thing is all it’s cracked up to be either.
You’ve got an industry producing cows that have a certain kind of meat (“lots of fat”) so they set up a “rating system” that puts the kind of meat they produce up at the top.
Does being “marbled” make the meat taste better? Or does it just mean it’s tender because all that fat melts when you cook it?
- Let it rest for about 5 minutes afterwards!!!
To me, very much so, yes. Just like adding butter to many dishes makes them taste better. I like the flavor it adds in addition to being more tender.
To answer Leaper concerning spending more just to get “edible.” It probably wasn’t the best example… I was considering the worst case scenario and if it comes down to it, I’d rather spend $20 on something someone really messed up but I could still eat than $5 on something someone really messed up that I had to toss in the trash. What I should have said is that cooking a good steak is simple (as mentioned above) and with a little common sense, and just a bit of salt (or seasoned salt) and pepper it is easy to turn out something very good. For a cheap cut it is more difficult and usually more difficult to prep (marinade, tenderize, careful controlled cooking time/temp, etc.) and cook. So assuming someone with average skills, they probably have a better chance of turning out a good expensive steak than a good cheap one.
All I know is when I bought steak from Costco the first time, it was miles better than anything I’d ever bought from a grocery store. That’s the only place I buy steak now— a pack of four thick “choice” ribeyes runs around $30, but they’re so big that my wife and I can split one steak. They have “prime” steaks too, but I’ve yet to try them; they’re considerably more expensive and the “choice” steaks already seem pretty amazing to me.
Swear I’m not a shill for Costco. I’m just so impressed by the quality of their meat that I’d probably maintain a membership just to be able to buy it.
Filet is one of the most expensive of all steaks (if not the most expensive), and totally not worth it. Sure it is tender but there’s no fat, and no marbling and thus no flavor. On the bone cowboy ribeye, and skirt steak are solid in the flavor dept. Deftly grilled of course.
Costco does have excellent meat. There was a time when we had a Sam’s one mile away, and a Costco a mile the other way, and I got to do most of our shopping in alternating visits. Most of Sam’s cut beef is pretty good and well priced, but their ground meat is… iffy. Costco is a little pricier but has almost butcher-quality meat products… and more than once I was lucky enough to be there when they brought out the USDA Prime standing rib roasts, which disappeared off the meat rollaway before it got to the case.
Unfortunately Sam’s is now 15 miles away, and Costco a difficult 30+. If they had tri-tip, though, I’d re-up and make the jaunt. Need to check…