Thursday, September 27, 2012

Where's the Eye in this Ribeye?

I don't mean to pick on Martin's at the Reading Terminal Market (see my previous post about the shop's ground meat labelling), but where's the "eye" in this ribeye steak?

It's there, but hardly more than two or three bites. All the rest is bone and "deckle".

Now it happens that this would be  perfect steak for me. The deckle is the fattier meat surrounding the ribeye, and it's more frequently known as ribeye cap. I love it: flavorful and tender because of all that fat marbled through it.

But that high a proportion of deckle to ribeye is not what most people expect when buying a ribeye steak, a.k.a. Delmonico. In this case the steak was cut from one of the ends of the rib primal (I'm guessing the chuck end rather than the short loin, from whence strip steaks and porterhouses reside).

By the way, deckle is not a specific cut of meat, rather, it's a term to describe any piece of fattier meat normally cut along with leaner meat. Get a whole brisket (as opposed to the "first cut" you usually see) and it will have a huge, fatty, flavorful adjunct of deckle. The best tasting brisket you'll ever have will be one cooked whole with the deckle.

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