[Music]
now it's pretty easy to go to the
grocery store and purchase prepackaged
stew meat like I have here but as we
found in the Test Kitchen it's almost
impossible to know from which part of
the animal the stew meat came I mean in
one package we may have cuts from the
round the Chuck and even the sirloin and
in addition with pre-cut meat there's no
way to control the size of the pieces
they're often unevenly sized or shaped
and we cook at a different rate you can
see this one is very different from this
large piece of meat right here so don't
buy the prepackaged
stmi now our preference is to cut our
own sty and the best beef for stewing
comes from the shoulder of the animal
where the muscles are tough but full of
beefy flavor and intramuscular fat now
that fat is going to melt into the meat
keeping it super moist and really really
rich and as an added bonus shoulder cuts
are very economical sometimes I can pick
it up for about $1.99 a pound now our
favorite shoulder cuts for stewing are
top blade steaks which are also called
FL iron staks you can also use a Chucky
roast which I have here and it's
sometimes easier to find than those
blade staks now to cut this big roast
for stui we want to trim away any excess
fat in silver skin now as you can see
this is a pretty large roast here it's
about 3 and a half to 4 lbs which is
what I'm using for our stew and to make
this large cut easier to manage I'm
going to first pull along this fat line
here so you just go in there and you
start to tear it apart it's using your
hands it should come apart relatively
easily and if it doesn't just grab your
knife and you can keep cutting it away
now I should talk a little bit about
knives you'll probably want an
assortment on your board a chef's knife
is always a good idea for just about any
job in the kitchen but I also like to
use a boning knife for this job it's
pretty flexible blade here and will help
to cut away any thin lines of fat or
silver skin which I'll show in just a
minute so I'm going to use this knife
almost all the way through and I'll
continue cutting away that lobe of meat
and just set it aside
so now we have two more manageable cuts
of meat it doesn't look like this
particular roast has any more fat lines
but some roast will have three and you
would just pull it into thirds so let's
proceed now I can cut away any excess
fat or silver skin and I should point
out what silver skin is it's this kind
of filmy tissue that coats the meat it
may be found on the outside of the meat
or even inside as you see here now it
never breaks down during cooking like
fat will and it actually becomes tougher
and tougher as the cooking goes on so
let me show how to get rid of it just
take again your boning knife you want to
slip it right in underneath the silver
skin and just make a cut and pull up
that silver skin you can see it's almost
like a tag now now you can start to rip
it
away and cut away any excess it's as
simple as that now I should also point
out that there's different types of fat
in this roast there's the intramuscular
fat and sometimes it's called marbling
we like that fat we want to keep that in
there but any hard fat like say this
giant chunk here we want to get rid of
that because that will also never really
fully melt into the stew so let's just
again get a little handle there on it
and cut that away you can see it's just
really hard it's almost as tough as the
meat so get rid of
that and see I found another Fat line so
now I can go ahead and rip this meat
right through as well
the more you open the meat up the easier
it's going to be to get rid of this hard
fat that's exactly what you want to
do but if you press on the fat and it's
soft it's okay to keep it in there it's
going to melt into the stew I actually
make your your sauce and your stew quite
Rich we can get rid of excess fat later
as I'll show
you all right so this particular piece
is pretty well trimmed so now I want to
cut it into even chunks and even shaped
pieces and you want to aim for pieces
that are between an inch to an inch and
a half in size they're going to be large
enough so the Browning isn't going to
have to be done in more than two batches
even if you're using a large Dutch
oven you don't want to trim this away
until it turns into a Tinder loin that
is for sure now that may look like it
was a lot of work but it actually wasn't
it's going to save you a lot of money
too prepackaged stew meat is more
expensive than breaking down your own
roast