How To Tell If Your Steak Is Actually Good

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There’s nothing like the arrival of Memorial Day weekend to motivate a man to head out to the backyard to scrape off and fire up the grill. Or, if you’re like me, the long weekend motivates you to get up early in order to fight your neighbors for one of the two grills your apartment’s management company provides. City life -- it’s a beautiful thing.But once you’ve stabbed the son of a bitch from across the hall with his own grilling spatula and hidden the body, what are you throwing on that magnificent steel meat edifice you fought so hard for? Hot dogs? Sure. Bratwurst? Now we’re talking. Burgers? Of course. But what about steak? After all, is there a better way to honor the fallen and display your American pride than to enjoy that most literally red-blooded of all meals, a juicy steak? Of course not. But when you’re at the supermarket (or artisan butcher if you’re pretentious, as I imagine the guy from across the hall is), how much thought do you put into your steak selection? Sure, you’re not going to blow your money on the USDA Prime cuts, and you know you don’t want the low-grade stuff that only Taco Bell feels fancy buying, but beyond that? Beef’s beef, right?As it turns out, no. I recently spent a weekend out in Ohio with the good folks at Certified Angus Beef. They opened an educational and culinary center where the company’s meat scientists (that still makes me giggle, but these are actual, brilliant people with PhDs in meat science) educate everyone from chefs to food industry people on the heritage, quality and preparation of their beef, and they invited a group of journalists (and me, for some reason) to come in and experience it. Much to my surprise, I can honestly say it was one of the most eye-opening experiences I’ve had since I figured out how babies are made last year.For one thing, there’s a difference between cattle belonging to the Angus breed and Certified Angus Beef. All Certified Angus Beef cows are Angus (along with probably any other beef you buy in a store), but not all Angus cows are Certified Angus. Certified Angus Beef is a nonprofit brand designed to ensure and promote a certain standard and uniformity of quality in beef products. Every cut of beef you purchase in a store comes from a cow given a grade by the USDA, ranging from “Select” to “Prime” (there are lower grades, but you can’t purchase them at retail and you wouldn’t want to anyway). For most beef products, that’s the extent of their quality control. Certified Angus Beef takes that a step further, or rather 10 steps further. To become a Certified Angus Beef cow, the carcass has to pass 10 quality specifications, each one quantifiable and easily measurable. Each specification was explained (and demonstrated) to us in exhaustive detail, and a passing carcass falls somewhere in the gray area between “Choice” and “Prime” on the USDA scale. The visual difference is noticeable, with a CAB ribeye looking more like non-CAB Prime than Choice. Certified Angus Beef produces its own Prime products as well, based on the same quality specifications, though these cattle are exceedingly rare. To give you an idea, currently around 2.9% of all carcasses get the USDA Prime grade. The number for Certified Angus Beef Prime carcasses is somewhere south of 1.5%. Continue Reading

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