For many home cooks, cooking meat is one of the most terror-inducing tasks they’re given. Often, all you need to say is “cook meat,” and people get triggered. I admit that before I took the time to learn, understand, and master meat, I felt equally overwhelmed! I can totally relate to being served tough, flavorless cuts of meat that have been cooked incorrectly. But as a chef, I’ll tell you that even tough cuts of meat can turn into hearty, buttery, fall-off-the-bone, all-flavor-intact-dishes when the proper cooking techniques are implemented. Let’s learn how.

Tough versus Tender

Tough cuts of meat come from sections of a cow’s hardworking muscles. The cow’s shoulder blades, neck, upper arm, breast, and leg muscles, just like a human’s, are all hard at work throughout the day. Chuck, brisket, shank, and plate primal cuts come from these tough sections. The largest of these cuts is the chuck primal, which means that the majority of the meat you pick up at your local butcher or supermarket come from here. In addition, one third of a cow — the loin, sirloin, tenderloin, round, and flank primals — isn’t kosher, which narrows down your buying options. Tender cuts of meat come from a cow’s midsection. These muscles are weaker and are either relatively low-activity muscles or suspension muscles (which support other muscles) and aren’t used much, yielding the most tender, juicy, and flavorful cuts of meat. Common cuts of meat from the rib section are the rib-eye steak, standing rib roast, prime rib, flanken, Miami ribs, short ribs, and spare ribs. Other cuts from the midsection aren’t available to the kosher consumer, since the sciatic nerve runs through them.

Tender cuts of meat aren’t ranked for their tenderness by the amount of fat they contain, but rather by how marbleized the fat is within the meat, or how evenly distributed. If a cut of meat has a subcutaneous fat cap (a big hunk of fat in one place) and no marbled fat within the meat fibers, the fat can all melt at once in the oven, leaving you with a tough and chewy piece of meat. On the other hand, a cut of meat that has plenty of fat marbleized throughout the meat fibers gives every bite some fat, flavor, and a buttery mouthfeel.