A well aged rib-eye steak is choice!
Has anyone followed the directions in The Joy of Cooking about “larding” cuts of meat using a tool to insert strips of fat into cheaper cuts of meat to marble them?
Ask your butcher to let you know when he gets hanger steak. Restaurants snap it up and apparently pass it off as a pricier cut; it’s actually the most delicious of the cheap cuts, when you can find it.
I’ve had Waygu steak in Tokyo; it had the texture of squid and was soaked in butter. Not really what I buy steak for.
My mom had no complaints when she got one on the day before yesterday at O’ Charley’s. 
God bless you and her always!!!
Holly
Very, very old technique and more suited to the days when working cattle (including pasture-fed beef cattle) were slaughtered older and had less fat. Rarely needed with modern beef.
See Cook’s Illustrated/ATC’s recipe for French Pot Roast, where they deconstruct the days-long old process that included lardons.
Tri-tip is incredibly easy to find in the Atlanta area. It hasn’t been exclusive to California or Texas in many years. Any Trader Joe’s will have them.
<fx bogart>I must have been… misinformed.</fx>
They’re sure as hell unavailable here, along with about five other foodstuffs I regard as the stuff dreams are made of. I’ll have to forage further.
The tri-tip roast is commonly seen around NYC.
However the trip-tip, AKA Santa Maria, steak is almost unknown.
They are the exact same cut. The steak is cut from the roast, but most people use the terms interchangeably.
I know they are the same cut, but you never see tri-tip steak packaged. 9 times out of 10, if you ask for it at the butcher, they’ll give you a bit of a funny look, except in Greenwich Village, where they call it a Newport Steak.
Note that the tri-tip/Santa Maria/Newport steak is not interchangable with any ol’ Sirloin. It’s a specific piece and there’s only two in the cow.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/dining/13mini.html, wherein Mark Bittman comments it’s a rarely-seen cut of steak.
The main difference between grades of steak is the fat content, so can “choice” be upgraded to “prime” by larding?
The first time I saw or heard of tri-tip was around 1987 in California. I moved back to New York a year later, and around then I began to hear of it. It’s not commonly known around here, but any butcher can provide you with one if you ask.
The trip-tip is often still attached to a steamship round. If I see one of those being served I’ll try to get some cut from the tri-tip.
Larding can improve the flavor, it can help roast cook evenly and improve their texture, but it’s not the same as getting the effect of good marbling in meat. Marbling is seen as the slivers of fat embedded in the meat in a cut of steak. Marbling increases as the cattle get fatter, and these days they rush the poor beasts to the slaughterhouse as fast as they can so good marbled beef is harder to find. Since the best marbling comes from older cattle there other factors make that better tasting, not just the fat content. One of the biggest factors affecting the taste of beef is the food that they eat. Cattle raised on corn and chemicals aren’t going to taste as good as the ones that graze.
Granted, but from what I understand, there are not “prime” “choice” and “select” herds of cows, but all sides of beef come in and are graded by marbling. If this is true, the “prime” and “choice” cows ate the same food.