Beef Top Round Steak Recipe New York Times
Turning to Cube Steak, and Back to Childhood
I AM in love with the cube steak.
There. It's out. My madeleine is a piece of round steak mechanically mashed into submission.
The realization came to me not too long ago, when I found a package in the grass-fed beef bins where I buy my groceries. I took them home, patted them with some seasoned flour and slipped them into a hot skillet. Six minutes later I was right back at my childhood dinner table, when cube steaks on a Tuesday night meant life was safe, steady and predictable.
But my feelings for the cube steak are more than nostalgic. That I can get grass-fed cube steaks for about $8 a pound (half that if I go for conventionally raised beef) is a comfort to my budget, too.
The cube steak is suddenly one of the hottest cuts of beef in the country, according to figures from the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. The amount of cube steak sold during the last quarter of 2008 was up by almost 10 percent over the same period a year earlier. The overall amount of beef sold went up only 3 percent.
It doesn't take a wizard to figure out that the economy's swan dive has much to do with the cube steak's resurgence. But even before kitchen budgets became tight, the cube steak had its fan base.
Through good times and bad, it has remained a wallflower among meat cuts. Old-fashioned and a little mysterious, it's a steak without pretension, or maybe a hamburger with humble aspirations.
But tell people you're on a little cube-steak jag, and the reactions you get — either pro or con — are surprisingly powerful considering we're talking about a cutlet.
Image 
"I feel sad and sick whenever I hear the term 'cube steak,' " said a friend whose mother used to bake them into greasy, grim casseroles studded with string beans. The cube steak represents all that was unstylish and lacking in her childhood.
Bill Niman, the boutique beef man from California, has a strong reaction to the cube steak, too. It's not all bad. He appreciates that the cube steak once served as the convenience food for an entire generation. And he likes that the tenderizing method helps make use of the whole animal, which is especially helpful for small-scale grass ranchers with tiny profit margins.
But when Mr. Niman fixed one for himself recently, it only served to remind him of the gloopy, tomato-soaked Swiss steaks of his childhood.
"I fed it to the dogs," he said.
But other people jumped on me like I was a long-lost sorority sister when I brought up my appreciation of the cube steak.
"Oh, I just really love them," gushed Kathy Sullivan, 66. A Rhode Island resident, she has warm memories of cube steaks served alongside her father's homemade piccalilli relish. Later, she pan-fried them for her own children. But only good ones, she said, made from slices of sirloin or round steak she had the butcher cube by hand.
Susan Schultz, who lives in Fort Atkinson, Wis., fondly described the slightly pink centers of cube steak sautéed in nothing more than butter and seasoned with a little salt and pepper.
"It was kind of an upgraded hamburger if you couldn't afford steak," said Mrs. Schultz, who raised two children on pan-fried cube steaks. "I'm going to have to have one now."
The term "cube" can be a little murky. It doesn't refer to the shape of the meat, which is usually beef but is sometimes made from pork, elk or other animals. Rather, it refers to both the shape of the dimples that checkerboard the surface of cube steak and the process that puts the dimples there.
Image
Although pounding tough pieces of beef to make them more tender has a long history in the Southern and Western United States, it wasn't until patents on mechanized cubing machines were handed out in the 1930s and 1940s that the cube steak became an inexpensive butcher shop staple.
The machines are usually stainless-steel cases with innards fashioned from rollers covered in dozens of teeth sharp enough to pierce flesh cleanly. There are top-feeding home machines with cranks that do the job, too.
As the steaks caught on, the term "cubing" entered the lexicon to describe other ways of dimpling a tough piece of meat to make it tender, whether the tool was a medieval looking mallet, a handheld device with thin blades or even the edge of a heavy plate.
As an added perk, the dimples provide more surface area for flour to cling to, which makes for crisper cutlets in applications like chicken-fried steaks.
A cube steak is usually from the top or the round, parts of the animal that are tough because they get a lot of exercise. Sometimes, a butcher will use a slice of sirloin. The only cuts that can't be used are shank and heel meat. Usually the cube steak is one solid piece of meat, but sometimes the cubing machine has been used to compress several strips or bits of meat into one cutlet.
"There'd be no crime to use two or three small pieces of top round or bottom round or sirloin and knit it together in the cube steak machine," said Louie Muench, whose father opened Louie's Finer Meats in Cumberland, Wis., almost 40 years ago.
Certainly, the practice of knitting together odds and ends has contributed mightily to the cube steak's reputation as a mystery meat. Lynne Olver, a research librarian and editor of The Food Timeline, a culinary Web site, sent along a 1969 Consumer Reports investigation entitled "Cube Steak: Often a Doubtful Buy."
"There's nothing wrong with improving a good, but tough, cut of beef by running it through a tenderizer, and then selling it at beef prices," the authors wrote. "But when there's no way to tell the difference between that product and meat scraps, perhaps with fat added, the products should be defined by law."
Image
That kind of controversy has not dampened true fans of the cube steak. In the South, the cube steak is countrified under a blanket of onions and gravy. In the Midwest, the cube steak is happily baked into the casseroles. In Texas, it's buried under the cream gravy, and in Miami it's nestled alongside a pile of onions seasoned with lime.
I sent out a family e-mail message to some Cuban in-laws asking them about the popularity of the cube steak in the Cuban kitchen. My query started a string of more than 50 e-mail messages among opinionated cooks from Miami to Seaside, Calif.
They waxed lyrical about bistec de palomilla, the Cuban national steak, and debated whether lemon juice was a reasonable substitute for lime juice in the marinade. People weighed in on the etymology of the word "palomilla" and the political leanings of the late Nitza Villapol, the Cuban cooking teacher who codified the nation's cuisine in books and on television.
So yes, the cube steak is popular in the Cuban kitchen.
"My mother-in-law makes it, my grandmother makes it and I make it about once a week," said Vivette Castro, among the best cooks in the clan. Family methods vary, but her steaks get a bath in lime juice and garlic for at least an hour. When she's in a hurry, she'll grab a foam tray of cube steaks, but her family prefers it when she has the butcher at the supermarket run a piece of round or sirloin through the tenderizer — twice.
In the Southeast and mid-Atlantic regions of the United States, the cube steak dresses up regularly as a smothered steak. Braised slowly with fried onions and chicken stock, cube steaks were an essential part of Gillian Clark's childhood — so much so that Ms. Clark, a chef in Washington, D.C., put the recipe in her memoir, "Out of the Frying Pan," (Thomas Dunne Books, 2007).
Leftover braised cube steak, she writes, makes an irresistible sandwich. But make sure you add napkins to the lunch bag. A cube steak sandwich once made her daughter's hands so greasy, she slipped off the monkey bars at school and broke an arm.
Texans view the chicken-fried steak as a birthright, but you best not call it a cube steak. The ensuing discussion can be as heated as one about whether a proper CFS (shorthand for chicken-fried steak among those who think deeply about it) should be coated with seasoned flour and pan-fried or dipped in a batter and deep-fried.
Most Texas restaurants will say they make the dish with flattened round steak, whether they tenderize it by hand or buy it mechanically tenderized. Technically, that is a cube steak. But in Texas, the supermarket-style cube steak is considered too puny for the job.
Image
To understand the nuances of the Texas cube steak debate, I called Robb Walsh, the Houston-based food writer who has written extensively about the origins of CFS.
"It's an interesting question," Mr. Walsh said. He would not concede that the meat in a chicken-fried steak is necessarily cube steak, although some recipes call for just that.
Mr. Walsh, who has divided the state into three distinct CFS regions, also thinks a batter-dipped slice of steak is just as good as one dipped in flour or even one dressed in a mixture of egg and bread crumbs, schnitzel-style.
I ran this information by Bud Kennedy, who has been writing about things Texas for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram for 28 years. Even over the phone, I could tell he was shaking his head. A chicken-fried steak in his part of Texas is simply coated with flour and pan-fried.
"The only school of thought here is whether the gravy goes on top of the steak or under the steak," he said. "He's dealing with the global chicken-fried steak issues down there in Houston. But it's not something you want to overthink."
For the record, Mr. Kennedy thinks cube steaks "are just scrawny." He likes a pounded-out round steak.
Gus and Rosemarie Hudson fried, by their estimation, a million chicken-fried steaks before they retired and closed down Gennie's Bishop Grill near Dallas a few years ago. They liked to use bottom round because "it was the best you could get for the price," Mr. Hudson said. His meat supplier tenderized them for him in a cubing machine.
So would he call it a cube steak?
"I don't care what you call it," he said. "It's a cutlet, period."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/dining/04steak.html
0 Response to "Beef Top Round Steak Recipe New York Times"
Post a Comment