Imagine going to a five-star restaurant and ordering yourself a fancy steak. But the texture seems a bit off when the glistening steak arrives on your plate, and you eventually begin cutting it. You ignore the texture and decide to take a bite of the piece. But the taste isn’t what you expected it to be.
Do you go down in the kitchen and blame the chef, or do you think maybe you ordered something weird?
Well, Indian food or halal Pakistani food is quite easy to consume. But what is not easy to consume is an actual premium steak. Yes, I said that right. A real piece of juicy, tender steak.
Though it looks easy, and quite frankly, there is not any specific training required to cut a steak, the cutting technique actually affects the taste and texture of your steak.
Typically if their’s is something off about the steak, you need to double-check whether it’s a poor quality steak or not. But if everything is good to go, you might need to perfect our steaking cutting.
How To Cook Steak At Home
So, if you decide to cook your own steak at home, here is one thing you need to follow, no matter what recipe you are adopting.
Let The Steak Rest, Please
Before you begin cutting into your steak, you must wait for a long enough time. Of course, steaks cannot be treated like chicken biryani, so it is served immediately. This helps seal the juices that would spill across your table while cutting the steak.
What You Need to Know Letting The Steak Rest
While cooking your steak, it will make the protein fibres inside the meat contract and push the juices toward the middle of the steak. When you start cutting straight away into it after you’ve finished cooking it – regardless of what method you have used -, you’re permitting these juices to escape from the meat. And you don’t want that as these juices hold moisture and flavour. If you let it sit instead, the muscles of the steak relax, allowing delicious juices to flow across the entire cut, starting from the middle and throughout the cut.
Restaurants in Milton or Restaurants in Britannia all use this basic technique of resting the steak. The resting of the steak allows the heat to still stay intact and cooks the steak even more thoroughly while the resting is going on. Typically, the resting time allows the steak to reach the desired temperature and finish the cooking process while resting.
How to Rest Steak
When your steak is about to reach the desired temperature, take the steak from your grill and put it on a cutting board or platter. To do this precisely, keep the temperature in check with a cooking thermometer. Securely cover it with aluminum foil, but ensure you leave enough room for air to circulate. This allows your steak to retain enough heat but not continue to cook to a full temperature.
In general, you should allow your steak to rest for anywhere between five to seven mins before you are ready for serving. It’s best for the steak to attain an internal temperature of around 130 degrees F. This ensures a flavorful steak with no unwanted rawness.
Once this time has been completed, you can remove the aluminum foil and then serve the steak.
Now we understand that other foods like Italian food, Indian food, and chicken chowmein don’t necessarily require the food to rest, but steaks need to be rested for the reasons mentioned above.
Okay, now that you have rested the steak, let’s talk about how to cut the steak.
How To Cut A Steak Properly
The most effective way to be sure that every piece of steak remains succulent and tender is by cutting it against the grain. Your steak’s grain is the direction that the muscle fibres pass through the cut.
The Reasons to Cut Against the Grain
When you cut in the direction of the grain, it will cut the muscle fibers inside your steak, reducing the length of the slice. Cutting against the grain will keep the muscle fibres of your cut intact and running through your meat.
Gnawing into a piece of meat after cutting across the grain allows your teeth to slide between the fibers, breaking the steak as you chew. When you cut pieces across the grain, the continuous muscle fibers create more significant pieces that make it difficult to break apart- failing to cut along the grain makes the steak more challenging to chew.
Determining The Direction of the Grain
When looking at a cooked or raw steak, it is essential to see the direction in which the meat’s muscle fibers go. If you can cut your steak against the grain, you’ll notice broken ends and individual muscle fibers in the cross-section of your steak. When you cut along your grain in the cut, fibers of muscle will flow in unison through the cut steak.
It is possible to see muscle fibres when you cook your steak. However, it is more complicated than with an uncooked cut because of grill marks. To ensure you can cut with precision every time, you might decide to snap a photo of the steak before cooking. Another alternative is to square off one end prior to cooking the steak to show the correct direction for cutting in the direction of the grain.
Instead of searching for online food delivery near me, you can now make restaurant-quality steak in the comfort of your home.
How to Cut Against The Grain
Once you have identified the direction of the grain in your steak, cut it with your knife parallel to the grain lines. This implies that your cut will cross several muscle fibres, causing them to shrink rather than rub against them.
If you are cutting your meat along the grain, you must be aware that the same steak could have grains running in different directions based on the method of butchering. It is important to know the direction of the grain for every steak cut.
The grain doesn’t move in the same way on the exact piece of beef. The grain lines don’t follow a uniform pattern in this cut. Therefore, make sure to adjust your cutting angle when you move across the cut.
So long as your focus is on the direction of the grain in your mind, you don’t need any fancy cutting techniques to properly eat your steak. This easy method will let you get the most enjoyment from your steak to the fullest extent of its potential
Final Thoughts
A steak that is tender and filled with flavor is enjoyed by many. So, knowing how to cut it properly is the key here. Plus, if you know how to rest your premium piece of meat, you can enjoy restaurant-quality steak at home.