Mmmmm, cheap steak...

I have a crap ton of RSS feeds from various food blogs that make my mornings at work manageable.  Recently, I ran across one blog that was referencing another food blog about turning cheap-ass steaks into gourmet steaks.  Considering that I will be a very poor graduate student shortly, any way to cut my grocery expenses and keep steaks in the weekly rotation vastly appealed to me.  Jaden Hair at the Steamy Kitchen blog gives a great outline on how brining a steak 40 mins or more before cooking it turns it from something you’d scrape off the back of your tires into a very nice, eatable steak.

So, I wanted to see if it would work on the cheapest of cheap steaks – the chuck steak.  Please feel free to insert any “ewws” at this point.  But, what is life but a big experiment?  So I salted that steak good and put it in the refrigerator for 50 mins.  I probably should have left it alone for longer, but my stomach was touching my spine and making fighting cats noises so I couldn’t wait any longer.

The result was a better steak, no doubt about that.  It was upgraded to a round top quality.  And there’s the rub – this works best with middle-range steaks like round tops and less so with the cheapest of the cheap.  You can dress up a prostitute all you want but real life doesn’t have Pretty Woman scenarios for steaks.   A very cheap steak will always be a cheap steak, even if it is a slightly less cheap steak when you are done with it.

The next experiment on the list for steaks?  Resting it according to the Food Lab guidelines.