It’s arguably the most important part of enjoying steak, but it can be hard to do if you don’t know where the grain is.
Do you know what a “grain” is? Not a grain of sand, cereal or truth, but the grain of a piece of wood, fabric or meat — all references to the direction of the fibers running along an object like a table, sweater or steak.
“Slice against the grain,” you may have read in a recipe. It’s arguably the most important step in enjoying steak, yet one that isn’t always intuitive.
To cut against the grain means to run a sharp knife at an angle to the muscle fibers running through a piece of meat. The idea here is to shorten those fibers as much as possible so chewing them is a breeze. “Otherwise, you’re going to wreck your teeth,” said Steve Kapusta, a butcher at Patton’s Meat Market in Duluth, Ga.
According to Mr. Kapusta, you can cook a steak perfectly, juicy as can be, but if you don’t carve it against or across the grain to shorten those muscle fibers, then it won’t be as tender.
Eating meat that’s been sliced along the grain is, according to my friend, the cookbook author Rick Martínez who also develops recipes for New York Times Cooking, the equivalent of chewing on “a ball of yarn” from which you’ve “sucked out the juice.” Unless you’re making a braised shredded-meat dish like ropa vieja, the long strands of tougher cuts will take a while to break down.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.