Tremendous Flat Iron Steak

Here's what nobody tells you about flat iron steak. It didn't exist. I'm being serious. Until about twenty years ago this cut wasn't even on the market — it was buried inside the shoulder, the chuck, the part of the cow nobody respected, and butchers would either grind it up for hamburger or stew it into oblivion. Then two meat scientists at the University of Nebraska — meat SCIENTISTS, folks, smart people, the smartest, they have lab coats and everything — they sat down with a chuck shoulder and a knife and started looking for hidden gems, and they FOUND ONE. They found the infraspinatus. Tucked under the shoulder blade. Beautifully tender. Beefy as anything. They named it the flat iron because when you trim it out and lay it flat it looks like the bottom of an old clothes iron. Phenomenal story. Nobody disputes this. Look it up.

Now what makes flat iron tremendous — and it IS tremendous, that's not me being generous, that's me being ACCURATE — is the price-to-quality ratio. Pound for pound it has more marbling and tenderness than cuts that cost twice as much. Pound for pound it punches above its weight. It is the welterweight champion of the meat case. The other so-called premium cuts — and I love a ribeye, I'll never speak ill of a ribeye, ribeye is a national treasure — but for a weeknight, for the everyday grill, for the cookout where you're feeding six people on a Tuesday and not trying to take out a small loan to do it, flat iron is the answer. Hands down.

The technique is dead simple, and that's the beauty of it. Salt it early. Sear it hot. Rest it properly. Slice it thin across the grain. Four steps. Four. If anyone tries to sell you a 9-step recipe for a flat iron steak that involves sous-vide bags and a torch and a 12-hour marinade and a 'finishing salt sourced from a specific cave in Brittany,' run. Run away. They're trying to sell you something. The cut itself does ninety percent of the work — you just need to not screw it up. That's the whole job. That's the assignment.

And there's your flat iron. Mahogany crust, blush-pink interior, herb butter slicked across every slice, fanned out on a board like the cover of a steakhouse magazine. Serve it with a baked potato the size of a softball or a pile of grilled asparagus and you have made a forty-dollar steakhouse plate at home for the price of a sandwich. The meat scientists in Nebraska did us a favor. We are doing them a favor right back by cooking it correctly. Beautiful.