Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Hanger steak and why you should eat it.

1. It owns. Texture, appearance, all of it. It's just awesome. It's got little texturey stripes running across it, with the occasional stripe of fat. While fairly lean, the fat comes out nicely in it, so you aren't eating amorphous blobs of blubber in between bites. The whole thing seems to look fairly like a meat xylophone. The unique way the grains cleave lends this thing extremely well to things like a good Italian steak and arugula salad, and even a carne asada taco. It cut cut cuts into nice little strips.

2. It's a sensible portion. This is very important. Y'all are probably eating way, way more meat than is recommended in a portion. This leads to over-eating, valuing quantity over quality, props up immoral factory farming agro-empires, and also leads to you being broke when you chuck down ten bucks for a single massive slab of over-fattened, corn-fed, and antibiotics-injected Barry Bonds cow. Make a fist. Hold it in front of your face. This is roughly the size of a serving of meat. Fortunately, hanger steaks come in these nice little strips, which weigh in much more respectably than a sixteen-ounce beef stonehenge.

3. It is cheap. Let me break it down for you. We last made some steak au poivre using a pair of hanger steaks, giving enough food for two folks easily. The cost for the steaks? Five bucks, altogether. For the quality of cut, you can't find better value out there, especially since there's an entire cabal of picky boring people out there who can only pronounce sirloin, ribeye, and t-bone.

4. It's a cut made popular as the one that butchers would reserve for themselves when they took a carcass apart. If you need any better indicator that it's a good cut, that's a winner.

5. It's diaphragm. Eeeeeeewwwww!!! Impress/amaze/disgust your friends. Serve fava beans and chianti and go FTHFTHFTHP. It's not offal, but it's a good bridge between organs and meat, and I'm always a fan of whatever gateway drug gets people into eating livers, chitlins, sweetbreads, etc. They're awesome and nutritious, and not only do they taste great but you have fun eating them. Think about watching animal planet, and seeing lions on the serengeti take down a zebra. You think the lions go for the sirloin first? Hell no, they zip open that belly and get whatever is squishy. Connect with your inner predator today, and you might find new things you enjoy.

So I hope I've helped to sell you on your next red meat purchasing decision.

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