On summer evenings at the Inn at Bay Fortune, Chef Michael Smith’s PEI hotel and restaurant where he hosts his famous, multihour Fireworks Feast, there are big and little fires everywhere. On a given day, there might be margherita pizza puffing up in a fire-burning oven, six chickens turning on a spit over dancing flames, or shucked oysters sitting on the embers of a hardwood fire.
Steak, which for many is the star of the $265 meal, is often cooked on a grill grate placed directly on top of a fire. There are about 15 different cuts the restaurant has cycled through in the past few years, including long skirt steaks from the plate of the cow and picanhas from the rump. One of Smith’s favourites is the flatiron, a well-marbled cut from the shoulder – a recipe for which is featured in his recent book Wood, Fire & Smoke.
If your idea of a steak dinner involves New York striploin, filet mignon or beef tenderloin, Smith advises you to go to the supermarket or a chain restaurant – you will never find them served at his restaurant.
Chef Michael Smith cooks picanha steak, which comes from the rump, over an open fire at the Inn at Bay Fortune in Fortune, PEI, in July.
“They’re part of a system that values convenience over flavour or beefiness,” he says.
In the past 15 years, “butcher’s cuts” – the pieces of meat that were difficult to sell to customers and used by butchers in their own kitchens – have supplanted many of the more classic steaks on restaurant menus. Cuts such as flatiron, hanger, bavette and flank steaks are now hot items at the butcher’s counter.
It’s the result of both consumers appreciating the more complex flavour in these traditionally less-prized cuts (similar to how North Americans finally came around in the past 20 years to valuing the juicier, more flavourful chicken thigh over the breast) but also the skyrocketing price of beef.
No matter what cut it is, consumers are paying more than they ever have before for beef owing in large part to a drop in the number of cows being raised in Canada, with many farmers leaving the industry.
In March, 2020, beef striploin cuts (from which New York striploins come) were $20.92 a kilogram and rib cuts (from which ribeye steaks come) were $22.23 a kilogram, according to Statistics Canada. Just five years later, striploin cuts have increased in price by 67 per cent and rib cuts by 75 per cent.
Even with these prices, a dizzying number of steakhouses have opened in Toronto in the past year, but it’s a rarefied lot splurging on those $295 A5 Wagyus and $200 bone-in New York strips. And so chefs, butchers and farmers are trying to find ways to still make steak dinners affordable for Canadians.
Last November, the Canada Beef Centre of Excellence, a group representing farmers that promotes Canadian beef, released a report identifying what they called “opportunity cuts” – portions of beef that were difficult to sell profitably to Canadians both at stores and restaurants. The top six included the outside skirt, the flank steak and the bottom sirloin tri-tip, which might range in price from $24 to $45 a kilo at the butcher.
‘Butcher’s cuts,’ such as flatiron and flank – that were difficult to sell to customers – have supplanted many of the more classic steaks on restaurant menus.Photo illustration by The Globe and Mail. Source image: Getty Images
The long-standing demand for prized steakhouse cuts has created opportunities for chefs to add traditionally less-valued cuts to their menus with creative presentation, effectively making them premium products, says Mathieu Pare, executive director of the centre.
The American beef industry did this in 1998 when it introduced the flatiron steak to the market, and in the aughts when short ribs – which had been long considered cheap stewing meat – were successfully rebranded as a main that could be served bone-in at upscale restaurants.
At the Urban Butcher in Calgary, which sells organic, grass-fed and naturally raised meats, customers have always come in looking for the cheaper alternative to premium-priced steaks, but staff have struggled lately to provide recommendations.
“For the most recent five years, a lot of these so-called off cuts have been just as expensive as some of the others, just based on demand,” says Shane Eustace, the shop’s operations manager.
While they are technically still cheaper than the premium cuts, they’ve been subject to much steeper inflation: At Eustace’s shop, flank steaks have increased in price by about 180 per cent in the past 15 years, compared with about 90 per cent for their bestselling ribeyes.
These days, he suggests budget-conscious customers consider the outside skirt steak – identified as one of Canada Beef’s “opportunity cuts.” It’s a steak that’s long been prized in Latin American cuisine for its fatty texture and quick cook time, and at $57 a kilo, it’s about half the price of upmarket tenderloin.
Consumers have started to appreciate the more complex flavour in traditionally less-prized cuts.
With the exception of steakhouses, new restaurants are increasingly building menus with just one steak featured on them, often a modestly portioned butcher’s cut that’s half or even one-third the price of a steakhouse’s ribeye or porterhouse.
At Gary’s, in Vancouver, chef Mathew Bishop serves a $45 reverse-seared bavette steak sliced against the grain in a pool of mushroom-madeira sauce with button mushrooms and a side of chips cooked in beef tallow with dijonnaise.
At Casavant, in Montreal, chef Charles-Tristan Prevost put a $31 hanger steak on the menu, which is seared and then finished in the oven and accompanied by local seasonal produce such as fiddlehead ferns or baby turnips.
Both Prevost and Bishop cited the relative affordability of these cuts as a key reason for their choice, but those in the know have long valued them for their tenderness and beefy flavour.
There’s not a lot of room for innovation when cooking steak, so sometimes an obscure or even difficult cut of meat can stoke the fires of inspiration for chefs.
Liam Beckett, the chef de cuisine at Primal in Saskatoon, builds dishes that can work with any cut of steak and encourages the farmers who supply him to send what they have. Not only is it more sustainable, it keeps things interesting for kitchen staff and guests, he says. The happiest surprise has been with oyster steaks, a small portion from the hip area veined with fat, which have become his favourite cut of any animal.
“The flavour matches any other piece on the animal and it is just as tender as any strip or ribeye out there,” he said.
Even after decades cooking countless cuts of beef, Jeremy Fox, the celebrated chef at Rustic Canyon in Santa Monica, Calif., was rendered speechless when he saw a 7-bone steak for the first time. Fox, the author of the forthcoming book On Meat, saw the rare cut in an Instagram post in 2019.
“It was like seeing the Beatles for the first time,” he recalls.
The post was from chef Sean Gray at Momofuku Ko in New York and featured a shot of what can only be described as a continent of beef, made up of more than 10 sovereign sections of meat with different grain directions and varied tenderness. Fox reached out to Gray and learned he’d first picked up this odd cut (labelled as “beef chuck first cut chuck steak bone-in”) at a supermarket for US$4.99 a pound and was inspired by its challenging size and range of textures.
Fox later tracked it down and cooked it himself. Impressed by how flavourful and complex the steak was, he assumed it would soon appear on restaurant menus nationwide as an affordable alternative to the ribeye or the striploin, much like the flatiron and other butcher’s cuts have, but it hasn’t happened. It turns out meat processors are unfamiliar with the cut, and there’s no marketing machine trying to make it mainstream.
Back on PEI, Smith blames the way meat is commonly processed for why some of the uncommon but tasty cuts of beef are difficult to find at mainstream supermarkets and many butcher shops.
From the bottom to the top: brisket, oxtail, split neck and cleaned picanha meat at Mr. Smith’s PEI hotel.
Many processors complain that flatirons, hangers and tri-tips are hard to butcher because of membranes running through them or challenging grain directions. It takes extra time and effort to extract those steaks.
“The European style of butchery honours the seams of the meat instead of the North American style, where we just come along and ram something through a saw and call it a cut,” Smith says.
Sometimes, there are only one or two of these butcher’s steaks per cow, or vendors don’t put them out because there isn’t enough demand for them. Your best bet at finding these cuts is visiting a whole-animal butcher shop.
They’re not any harder to cook, either. Skirt steaks take well to marinades, flatirons are tender enough that they’ll be fine even if you leave them on the grill a minute too long and a bavette cooks up faster than a striploin.
Through his restaurant, where he exclusively serves Prince Edward Island Certified Beef, Smith hopes to expand diners’ idea of what steak can be. Not just because the butcher’s cuts are a cheaper option, but because he believes they’re often far tastier than what’s on offer at premium steakhouses.
“The tenderloin, by definition, has zero flavour,” he says. “It’s just so bland. It’s nothing but mushy texture.”