How to Cook a Cheap Chuck Steak That's Better Than a Ribeye

All right, here we are in my home. Thank you for being here. We're gonna be inside, we're gonna be outside, zipping around today, grilling meat. In particular, grilled chuck steak. The ultimate grilled chuck steak. So I can take this chuck steak and I can literally transform it into a better eating ribeye with more flavor for cheaper. It's a win, win, win. This right here, ribeye steak, right? Kinda looks like a little tomahawk right now with the rib bone. But this is your stereotypical ribeye steak. They're one of the more expensive cuts. This is a chuck steak which has multiple muscles that are stuck together with collagen. It's a tough cut. A lot of folks take these chuck steaks and either grind it for ground beef, really good ground beef, a lot of flavor, or they braise it for a pot roast or something, right? What we're gonna do is take this chuck steak, which costs about half as much as ribeye, we're gonna transform it with sous vide. So we're gonna tenderize it and unlock all that juice and all that collagen is gonna turn to gelatin. It's gonna be super, super tasty and super tender, except it's gonna be medium rare. It won't be like this brown braisy thing. Gonna blow your mind. It's gonna blow your mind, your friend's mind, and it's gonna save you money while you do it. When I started cooking sous vide, you start to learn that you can transform some foods into things that were previously impossible. This chuck steak and transforming it into a super tender, rare or medium rare, however you prefer it, perfect steak, you couldn't do it before sous vide. And it's a combination of 24-hour cooking at exactly, say, 131 degrees Fahrenheit. There's just no other technique that allows you to do that. So I've got Juul over here. You can use any sous vide. Obviously, Juul's the best. Right now, take your phone out of your pocket, download the app, it's free. Go in here. Look, basic steak, ultimate steak. Here we go. Ultimate grilled chuck steak. It's right there, boink. So you get to choose exactly how you want your chuck steak to turn out right now. Check this out, visual doneness. You get to see the results before you even begin cooking. What other cooking technique promises that? I'm gonna do the rare, medium rare guy, boink. Here's what we're gonna do. Let me walk through this whole process just quickly. Okay, I've got my chuck steak. We're gonna pop it in a Ziploc bag. Start Juul, 131 degrees. That's a real low temp, it's like a rare, medium rare temp. We're gonna cook it 24 hours. Once it's tender, we're gonna pop it on the grill. That's it. But I'm gonna put a little bit of seasoning on before. And I'll probably put a little bit on afterwards, too. It's almost like half and half. So I'll put maybe half of my salt. And I'm just talking about salt here. You can put a lot of spices and herbs, all that stuff right now. But when it comes to salt, I'm gonna put a little bit on, pop it in, it'll cure a little bit, cam a little bit, but it'll add a lot of flavor. You don't always have to measure everything, but every once in a while when you measure and you check in, it just kind of like recalibrates like how you're seasoning things. So for example, that's 870 grams. So total, with a fatty cut of meat like this, you might want, by the time you're eating it and you're like, wow, this is really tasty and salty and yummy, you might want up to 2% salt. So that's like 16 grams of salt on this piece of meat at the end. But right now, I might just put five to six or seven grams, which is about half a percent of salt for this, right? So just enough to get a little bit of flavor, but not to over ham it. And if we really want, we can just like quickly, here, look, see what about eight grams looks like. That's not crazy. That's getting up to three grams. I'll do a little pepper, too. Why not? A lot of pepper. Okay. Maybe another, yep, another three or so. That's plenty of salt. Okay. Look at this. It's one of the things I like about having butcher paper around. Since we're talking about herbs, I'll put some more fresh stuff in here, too. It's like got a very vanilla, like smash that up. Yeah, here's the, that's so nice. You just put a little bit in broth. No joke, like this is a very good sweet flavor, too. Like I'm cooking oatmeal and you throw a fresh crumbled up bay in there. It's so good. Like brown sugar in this and it's good with steak. But yeah, bay leaf, look, a little bit of rosemary, a couple of smashed garlics. That's it. Easy. You can put olive oil, butter, too, if you want, you know. Here, a little California Arbequina, probably my favorite. California olive oil is so good. So I'm like drawing out this process and making it look all long and tedious, but basically the gist is you take the meat, you put it in the bag, you throw it in Juul, you wait 24 hours, you pop it on the grill, that's it, okay? Again, no tricks about this. If you haven't cooked sous vide, the only thing that matters is it's in the plastic bag, the water's on the outside of the bag, and the food's under the water. That's all that matters. The more you know. Cool. Ready for this? That guy's cooking, like I said, 24 hours. This one, same cut, same treatment. We dropped it yesterday. It's been cooking for 24 hours. It's tender. I don't even wanna push on it too hard because I'm gonna destroy it. Once I slice into it later, you'll see it's that perfect medium rare, too. It's gonna be all rosy and delicious. I feel like this could be a perfect opportunity to really drive home or give a little demo. If you're watching and you're interested, maybe it'll follow up in the edit of this video, or maybe we'll host it on ChefSteps, how to turn this bagged juice actually into an insanely flavorful sauce. Because right now, it just kind of looks like it's a sauce or gravy, but it's really just juice and moisture from the meat, which isn't that flavorful. But there are a couple of tips and tricks that only take a few minutes to turn that into something that is insanely flavorful. Should we do it? You wanna see it? If I had a control freak, I could do it right here. You put it in a pan. You simmer it down and evaporate it until all the moisture is gone. And then the protein in here starts to caramelize. Then you deglaze it. That's your sauce. Here we go. Right to the grill from here. Let's do it. Make sure you got a nice hot grill. It is. Nick made sure of that. Too hot is better than too cold. That's for sure. Easier to control a fire than to start one. That's for sure too. Here we go. That sound, that's the sound you want. That light smoke that's like whispin' out or rendering fat. You can see it drippin' out of these grill grates right here. Let's flip this guy over. If I've got two people or three people or four people, I'd rather do one or two big steaks and slice them up rather than a bunch of small ones. It's easier to manage. Oh, now we're talkin'. Oh yeah, baby. That is happy stuff, fellas. Well, there you have it. Dinner's served. Watch this, you guys. Listen to this. Okay, so here's our perfect steak. And you know, like a ribeye, it's got different muscles too. So here's a sneak peek. Where are those muscles? Give it a little tender jiggle. You know, maybe I'll separate that out here. Separate that guy out here. And I can cut these separately, which is all good. Baby. This is unlike any cut that exists out there. Let's just cut right into this big guy here. This is like almost like a New York. The other tip too, all these muscles are all over the place. You see how these lines are goin' this way? Just take that into consideration and start cutting against them. And look, see, now you see like that? That's more tender. If I cut the steak this way, it's gonna be a little bit chewier, which maybe you want, but cut against the grain, they're that much more tender. But look at that. Like, you won't get that on a ribeye, that intramuscular fat and that gelatin in between every little meat strand. That's like a short rib Chuck type thing, you know? I'm gonna try this one. I already know I'm gonna like it. Chuck's for 10 stars. Carefully assess the flavor. Flavor's 10 stars also. Oh, dude. All I wanna do is dip. Dip, dip, dip, dip. So this is Chuck steak, right? So it's that Chuck cut into a steak. It's amazing, lots of muscles in there. You can do the same technique with like a boneless short rib. It'll be insane. Meaning, cook it sous vide, medium rare, hit it on the grill. It's gonna be unlike anything. You could do it with like a osso bucco cut or something. You know, it sounds weird to have like a medium rare osso bucco, because we've been braising them for hundreds and hundreds of years, but osso bucco's the cross cut shank. Do it with that, man. That's gonna be insane. You can do the same thing on a cast iron pan on your countertop, right? No problems. Under the broiler. Oh yeah. The whole point is high heat, because it's already cooked. It's already tender. It's already perfect. You're golden. That's our ultimate Chuck steak. Oh yeah, buddy.