Introducing The Teres Major Steak

Teres major is not a steak you will find at most supermarkets. You’ll have to seek it out at a good butcher shop or from online sources. But it’s worth the effort to find and grill on your Weber gas grill.

Also known as a shoulder petite tender roast, petite tender, shoulder tender, or bistro tender, the teres major steak is lean but juicy, and as the alternate names imply, it’s very tender. It’s shaped like and eats a lot like a tenderloin but with a bit more fat and thus more flavor.

The teres major muscle is tucked away inside the chuck primal and comes from the shoulder blade. It takes more time and effort to fabricate this cut from the shoulder clod, which is why you don’t see it often in the usual retail settings. Continue reading Teres Major Steak →

In August 2018, I had a few issues grilling a flat iron steak and wrote about it in one of my posts. Two years passed and I completely forgot about that experience. I’m standing at the butcher counter in 2020, I see a flat iron steak, and I think I should try grilling one and posting about it here. Not until I started writing this post did I discover I’d cooked and posted about flat iron steak before!

Well, I’m happy to report that I had a better experience with flat iron steak this time.

If you don’t know much about flat iron steak, you can read about the origins of this cut of meat in my previous post.

First, I upped the grilling temperature…preheated for 15 minutes, two burners on MEDIUM-HIGH, one burner on LOW, and one burner OFF to create a hot direct zone and a cooler indirect zone in case I needed it. Turned out I didn’t need it. I seasoned the meat with Susie Q’s Santa Maria Style Seasoning and let it rest at room temp for 1 hour. Continue reading Flat Iron Steak Redo →

What Is Pork Secreto?

I noticed this interesting cut of pork in the fresh meat counter at Belcampo Meat Co. in Palo Alto, CA (before the location closed in March 2019). The butcher said it was equivalent to “pork brisket”, a “butcher’s secret” that they grilled for themselves behind the restaurant.

Good enough for them? Good enough for me!

When I got home, I searched the Interweb and found several definitions for pork secreto: the aforementioned pork brisket; pork skirt steak; a strip of pork hidden under belly fat; a cut that resides behind the shoulder; and a cut between the shoulder, ribs, and fatback.

So maybe “pork secreto” can be any number of things. In the end, I trusted the butcher that fabricated and sold the cut, as well as my own eyes, and decided that it looked like a tiny brisket weighing 1.25 pounds.

The butcher said this was a Duroc-Berkshire crossbreed, so a quality piece of pork.

It consists of two parts, like a beef brisket, but in the opposite configuration. In a beef brisket, the fatty portion comes from the chest and the lean portion is towards the belly. In a pork secreto, the fatty portion comes from the belly and the lean portion comes from the chest as part of the picnic…or so I’ve read. Continue reading Pork Secreto →

Introduction

In July 2019, I post a video review of the Impossible Burger at Burger King. The flavor was OK. The problem was the degree to which it was cooked. Two of the three burgers I tried were extremely dark on the outside, almost to the point of being burned, and they were not moist and juicy.

At the time of that video, raw Impossible Burger was not widely available in supermarkets. In the video, I commented that someday I’d like to get my hands on some and try cooking it on my Weber gas grill.

Well, that day arrived in July 2020.

I was doing my weekly grocery shopping at Safeway and noticed a display of raw Impossible Burger in the meat department, a 12-ounce package selling for $14.99! (At the time of writing this, just one month later, this same package sells for $9.99 at Safeway and $7.94 at Walmart.) I gulped hard, added a package to my cart, and headed to the checkout stand.

Continue reading Impossible Burgers On The Weber Gas Grill →