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You walk into Costco on a Saturday morning. You come through the doors past the row of gray shopping carts, and you go straight to the back wall where the meat is. You are not there for anything else. You are there for a ribeye. You
Butcher Frank Miller reveals 7 affordable beef cuts better than ribeye, explaining their qualities and how to find them.
Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.
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Key Takeaways
- There are affordable beef cuts that offer better flavor and tenderness than ribeye.
- Proper cutting and cooking techniques are crucial for enjoying these alternative steaks.
- Many grocery stores mislabel or do not stock these cuts, requiring consumer knowledge and communication with butchers.
- Industry practices influence availability and pricing of premium beef cuts.
- Learning about these cuts can save money and improve home cooking experiences.
What the video covers
- Frank Miller, a butcher with 31 years experience, introduces 7 budget-friendly beef cuts that outperform ribeye in flavor and value.
- He describes the common ribeye buying experience and the high cost that deters many consumers.
- The flat iron steak, once discarded due to connective tissue, was reinvented in 2002 and is now a tender, affordable option.
- Bavette (flap meat) is ideal for marinades and requires proper slicing against the grain to avoid toughness.
- The outside skirt steak is often mislabeled and replaced by the less flavorful inside skirt in grocery stores.
- Picanha (top sirloin cap) is prized in Brazil but rarely found in U.S. grocery stores due to different butchering methods.
- Miller emphasizes the importance of knowing what to ask for at the butcher counter to access these cuts.
- He offers additional resources on his website for shopping tips, cutting techniques, and recipes.
- The video highlights how industry decisions and naming conventions affect consumer choices and pricing.
- Miller encourages viewers to engage by sharing local prices and experiences with these cuts.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: The Ribeye Buying Experience
- 01:12Stopping Before Purchase: Rethinking Ribeye
- 02:22Number 7: Flat Iron Steak Overview
- 03:36Flat Iron Steak History and Preparation
- 05:00Number 6: Bavette (Flap Meat) Characteristics
- 06:16Additional Resources and Shopping Tips
- 07:05Number 5: Outside Skirt Steak and Mislabeling
- 08:35Identifying Outside vs. Inside Skirt Steak
- 09:43Number 4: Picanha (Top Sirloin Cap) Introduction
- 11:06Butchering Practices and Availability of Picanha
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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stop in front of the case. There is a long open refrigerated case with a black rubber mat under it. And it is full of ribeye steaks in clear plastic trays with white absorbent pads underneath and yellow labels on the top. Big steaks
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thick marbled white through the red. Then you look at the yellow label. $22 a pound. You stand there. You do not move.
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You do the arithmetic in your head the way everybody does, and you come up with a number for the two steaks that is more than you spent on dinner for the whole family last Tuesday. And here is the
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part I understand better than anybody because I have watched it happen from the other side of that glass for 31 years. You still want it. You're not going to walk away. You came in for a ribeye. Your wife is expecting a ribeye.
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It is Saturday. So you stand there for another 10 seconds, and then you pick up the tray and you put it in the cart, and you feel a little sick about it, and you go home. I want to stop you right there,
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right at that exact moment with your hand on the tray because there are seven steaks in that same building cut off the same animal that eat better than the one in your hand. And every single one of them costs less. One of them is under $5
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a pound. I am going to give you all seven. And I am going to tell you why almost nobody has heard of them, which is the part that is going to annoy some people because it is not an accident, and
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it is not a coincidence. It is a decision that gets made by people like me. Frank Miller, 31 years behind a butcher block. Before we start, one loop I want to leave running. One of these seven is being sold to you under the
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wrong name in most grocery stores in this country, and you are paying steak money for the worst version of it. I will tell you which one and how to spot it when we get there. Counting down.
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Number seven, the flat iron. Look at a flat iron, and it does not look like it should be good. It is a flat rectangle of dark red meat fairly even with a thin white line of connective tissue running
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down the middle of the whole slab. If it has not been cut properly, it comes out of the shoulder off the top of the blade bone. The muscle is called the infraspinatus.
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Here is the thing about that muscle. It is the second most tender muscle on the entire animal, second only to the tenderloin, which is the muscle they charge you $40 a pound for. So why has nobody heard of it? Because for most of
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the history of American butchery, nobody could sell it. That white line down the middle is a sheet of tough connective tissue. And if you cut a steak straight across that muscle, every bite has a piece of gristle in the middle of it. So
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the entire muscle went into the grinder. Millions of pounds of the second most tender beef on the animal ground up into hamburger for about a hundred years.
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Then in 2002, researchers went through the shoulder muscle by muscle looking for value that had been thrown away. And they figured out that if you lay the muscle flat and split it horizontally, top from bottom, you get two clean steaks with the
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gristle removed and nothing tough left in either one. That is the flat iron. It is a 23-year-old steak. It is not traditional. It is not heritage. It is a piece of beef that got invented in a laboratory because somebody finally
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bothered to look. About $8 to $11 a pound. Hot fire, four minutes aside, slice it thin across the grain. Number six, bavette. Also sold as flap meat or sirloin flap. This one is a loose, coarse, floppy piece of beef that comes
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off the bottom of the sirloin. If you have ever had carne asada at a taco truck that was better than any steak you cooked at home and you could not understand why, there is a fair chance you were eating this. Pick one up, and
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the first thing you notice is the grain. It is huge. You can see the individual muscle fibers with your eyes running in long ropes down the length of the piece, and it looks wrong. It looks like a cut
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of meat that would be tough. It is the opposite. That open loose grain is why it works. A coarse grain means the muscle takes marinade the way a sponge takes water all the way through instead of just sitting on the outside. And it
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means the fat sits between the ropes of muscle instead of in tight little flecks. Bavette is the single best cut on this list for anything with a marinade on it. The rule with it is absolute. You cook it hot and fast to about medium
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rare. You let it rest, and then you find the grain with your eyes, and you cut across it at a hard angle. If you cut it wrong, you will hate it. There is no cut of beef on the animal that punishes bad
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slicing more than this one. $8 to $12 a pound. Now, that ribeye is still in your cart in this story. And we are five cuts from the one that costs $4.99 before we get there. Every one of these
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seven cuts is sitting in the case at your store right now. And the reason you cannot find them is that you do not know what to look at. Now, before I get into it, one thing and one time only,
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there is more of this than I can fit in any video. How to shop Costco without getting taken. What every cut is really worth and the words to say at the counter to get it. How to cut and
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prepare your own meat the way we do it behind the block. Dry aging in your own refrigerator and every recipe I never gave out. I put all of it in a book at frankmillerbutcher.com.
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Link in my bio or scan the code on your screen. That is the only time you will hear me say it. Now, let us get back to the meat. Number five, outside skirt.
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And this is the loop. This is the one being sold to you under the wrong name.
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There are two skirt steaks on a beef animal. And they are not the same thing.
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The outside skirt is the diaphragm muscle proper. It is a long, thick, deeply grained strap of dark meat with a heavy fat cover on it. And pound for pound, it has more beef flavor in it than any steak on the animal, including
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the ribeye. That is not opinion. It is the muscle that never stops working. And working muscle carries myoglobin and fat and flavor. The inside skirt is a different muscle from the flank area. It is thinner, wider, leaner, and it is
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fine. It is perfectly good beef. It is not the same thing. Here's what happens in the trade. Outside skirt is in enormous demand from restaurants and from export, particularly to Japan, and it has been for decades. So very little of
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it reaches a grocery case. What reaches the grocery case is inside skirt in a tray labeled skirt steak at a price set by the reputation of the outside. Nobody is committing a crime. Both are legally skirt steak, but you are paying for the
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reputation of one and eating the other. How to tell? The outside skirt is thicker, closer to 3/4 of an inch and shorter and wider, and the grain runs across the short way. The inside skirt is thin, sometimes under half an inch
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and long, sometimes two feet long, and it usually comes rolled up in the tray.
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If it is rolled up in a coil, it is inside. And here is what to do. Go to a counter with a person behind it and ask for outside skirt by that name. Not skirt steak, outside skirt. Half the
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people you ask will not know there is a difference. The other half will know exactly what you mean and will look at you differently for the rest of your life. And number four, picanha, the top sirloin cap. Some places call it coulotte.
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This is a triangular piece of beef off the top of the sirloin with a thick white cap of fat still attached to one whole side of it. In Brazil, it is the most prized cut in the entire butcher
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shop. In the United States, for most of my career, it did not exist. And not because we do not have it. Every steer has one. It is that the American way of breaking down a sirloin runs the saw
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straight through it. That cap gets sliced up into ordinary to
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cut vanished into another cut. And the best part of it went in the trim. What makes it work is that fat cap. You leave it on. You score it in a diamond pattern with the tip of a knife. going through
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the fat and stopping at the meat. You salt it heavily and you cook it fat side down first over moderate heat so that fat renders and base the muscle the entire time it is cooking. 7 to $10 a
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pound when you can find the whole cap. Ask for the sirloin cap whole fat on. If the person behind the counter says they only have top sirloin steaks, that means the cap is already gone. Number three, the hanger. One per animal. Not one per
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side, one per animal. It is a thick, dark V-shaped piece of meat that hangs from the diaphragm and does no work at all, which is unusual for something in that part of the body. It has a heavy inedible senue running straight down the
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center that has to be cut out, which leaves you with two long strips. In France, they call it on. In the American trade, it has always been called the butcher's steak. And I want to tell you why. Because it is the honest reason,
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and it is not flattering. We took it home. There was one per animal. It was awkward to trim. It looks strange in a case and no customer ever asked for it by name. So, it went into the butcher's
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own bag at the end of the day. That is not a legend. I did it. Walt did it before me. Walt came home from Korea in 1954 and took a job cutting meat because his uncle knew a man and he never did
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another thing for the rest of his life. Walt kept a small square of butcher paper in the bottom of his bag every single day and the hanger went in it and he never once wrote it up as a sale and
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no manager ever asked him about it. He told me the hanger was the wage that did not show up on the check. It tastes like liver in the best possible way. Deep mineral almost bloody. It is the most
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flavorful steak on the animal that is still tender enough to grill whole. 9 to12 a pound if your store has it at all. Most do not. A real butcher shop will. Number two, the Denver. This one comes out of the chuck under the blade
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bone from a muscle called the seratus ventrolis. It is a long strap of beef that is marbled more heavily than almost anything else on the animal outside the rib section itself. If you put a Denver steak next to a select grade ribeye and
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covered the labels, most people would pick the Denver on looks. And the reason nobody had heard of it until recently is the same reason as the flat iron. It is buried inside the chuck. It sits under a shoulder blade and getting it out
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cleanly takes seam butchery. That means following the natural membrane between muscles with a knife instead of running a saw straight through everything, which is what almost every grocery store does because a saw is fast and a knife is
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slow. The chuck is the single most complicated part of the animal. There are something like a dozen distinct muscles in there and they range from the second most tender thing on the steer to something you would not put in a stew.
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When a grocery store runs a band saw through all of that and wraps it as chuck roast, every one of those muscles get sold at the same price. The good ones and the bad ones together. That is the sentence I am not supposed to say.
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So, let me say it plainly. The meat case is arranged to fool you. And I helped build those cases, not with lies. Nobody in the trade lies about what is in the package. It is arranged by what is easy
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to cut, easy to price, easy to stack, and easy to sell fast. The 8% of the animal that everybody has been taught to want gets put at eye level under the best light in the store. The other 92%
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gets sawed into rectangles and sold as generic. The system does not care that there is a heavily marbled steak sitting inside the chuck roast. It cares that the chuck roast weighs 4 lbs and moves on Sunday. Denver runs 7 to9
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a pound. Cook it like a steak. It is a steak. Now, here is where I take something back. I have told people for years that the chuck eye, which is number one, is exactly the same muscle as a ribeye. Same muscle, cheaper price.
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Get the chuck eye. That is not quite right. And I want to correct it out loud before I sell you on it. The ribeye muscle does continue forward into the chuck. That part is true. But it does not continue alone. And it does not
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continue evenly. As you move forward from the rib section into the shoulder, that muscle gets smaller and the muscles around it get bigger and those neighbors are not as tender. The first chuck eye steak off the front of the rib is very
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close to a ribeye. The second one is good. By the third or fourth, you are eating chuck and it is chewier. And anybody who tells you otherwise has not cut very many of them. So the honest version is this. There are about two
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stakes per side that deserve the comparison. Not a whole roast worth. And which two you get depends entirely on where the person with the saw made the cut that morning. That matters because it changes how you buy it. Number one,
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the chuck eye steak. $4.99 a pound where I saw it this week. and it comes off the very front of the chuck.
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Right where the chuck meets the rib section at the fifth rib. That is the seam. On one side of that seam, the beef is called ribeye and cost $22 a pound.
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On the other side, inches away. The same muscle is called chuck and costs five an inch of distance, $17 a pound.
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Tenderness is not quality. Tenderness is location. That is the whole business in five words. And once you have it, you will never look at a meat case the same way again. A muscle that worked is tough. A muscle that sat still is
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tender. The animal did not know it was building a luxury product. We drew the lines after the fact and then we priced the lines. Now, here is how to buy it because this is where people go wrong.
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You do not want just any chuck eye. You want the first one or two off the rib end. the ones that are still mostly the ribeye muscle. So you look at the steak itself. A good chuck eye has one large
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roughly oval muscle taking up most of the face of the steak with visible marbling running through it. And a smaller muscle or two around the edge. A bad one is three or four muscles of similar size all crowded together with
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heavy connective tissue lines between them. One big eye good. Four little ones. Put it back. Cook it exactly like a ribeye. Heavy salt 40 minutes minimum on a wire rack in the refrigerator. Hot cast iron or hot coals. 3 to four
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minutes aside for an inch and a quarter. Rested 8 minutes. Do not braze it. Do not slow cook it. It is a steak and it will behave like one. And call ahead.
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Chuck eyes sell out. There are only a handful per animal and the people who know about them buy all of them. Now I want to give you the part that is not on any list because this is the thing that
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actually separates people who eat well from people who pay well. None of these seven cuts are reliably in a grocery case. Some weeks they are there. Most weeks they are not because the case is built around what moves and what moves
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is ribeye strip sirloin ground beef but they exist in the building every one of them. They are inside larger pieces in the cooler in the back and the person behind the counter can get to them if you know what to ask for. Here is how to
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ask so that you get a yes. Do not ask for the retail name. Ask for the piece it lives in and ask on the right day for a Denver or a chuck eye. You say, "Do you have a chuck roll in the back? And
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can you cut me stakes off the rib end of it?" That is the whole sentence. A chuck roll is the boneless piece the whole shoulder comes off of. Every store that sells chuck has one. For picana, you say, "Do you have a whole top sirloin
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and can I have the cap off it with the fat left on?" For flat iron, you say, "Do you have a top blade and can you seam it and give me both halves?" For hanger and outside skirt, you say, "Do
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you get these in and when?" Because if the answer is Tuesday, then Tuesday morning is when you shop for the rest of your life. Two things that make this work. go on a weekday morning before 10.
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That is when the cutting is happening and the person has time. Saturday afternoon they are drowning and the answer will be no because no is faster and ask the same person every time and learn their name and use it. A butcher
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who knows your face will hold things for you that never touch the case at all.
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That is not a trick. That is just how the trade has always worked. And the reason nobody does it anymore is that we stopped talking to the people who handle our food. Nobody paid me to make this video. Costco did not send me anything.
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There is no code in the description and no knife company and no seasoning company. I am a retired butcher with opinions. And I want to widen this out because there is a reason I care about it more than a steak deserves. The
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cattle herd in this country is the smallest it has been since the early 1950s.
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That is a count, not an argument. Fewer cattle means less beef. And less beef means the number on that yellow label only goes one way. I have watched steak go from a Sunday thing to a birthday thing inside my own family. I have
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watched people who ate beef twice a week their whole lives quietly stop buying it, start buying chicken and never say a word to anybody about it because there is a kind of shame in it that does not get discussed. So hear me on this. You
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have not been priced out of beef. You have been priced out of 8% of the animal. The other 92% is still there. It is still on the same steer, raised on the same grass, and a good bit of it
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eats better than the 8% does. It just never had a marketing department. Here is your homework. Ask for the first Chuck eye off the ribbon. One big eye, not four little ones. Ask for a Denver off the chuck roll. Ask for the sirloin
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cap hole with the fat left on. Ask for outside skirt by that exact name, never just skirt. Go on a weekday morning before 10 and learn the butcher's name.
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Tell me in the comments what town you are in and what a pound of Chuck Eye costs at your store this week. Just the town and the number. I read every single one of them and I keep a list because I
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want to see what is actually happening out there and nobody's going to tell me on the news. Next time I am going to show you how to dry age beef in your own refrigerator with no special equipment for nothing using a piece of the
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cheapest cut in this video. There is exactly one mistake that will ruin it and make the whole thing smell like an old shoe. And I am going to show you that mistake first so you never make it.
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Until then, ask for the ribbon. Look for one big eye.
Topics:budget beef cutsflat iron steakbavetteoutside skirt steakpicanharibeye alternativesbutcher tipsaffordable steaksmeat cuttingFrank Miller butcher
