cow

cow

ON a stainless steel table in the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association test kitchen, a meat scientist named Bridget Wasser began dissecting a piece of beef shoulder as big as a couch cushion.

Her knife danced between long, thick muscles, then she flipped the whole thing open like book. After a tug and one final slice, she set before her visitor the Denver steak.

The three-quarter-inch-thick cut is an inexpensive, distant cousin of the New York strip. And it didn’t exist until the nation’s 800,000 cattle ranchers began a radical search for cuts of meat that consumers would buy besides steaks and ground beef.

The idea was simple. Dig around in the carcass and find muscles that, when separated and sliced in a certain way, were tender and tasty enough to be sold as a steak or a roast. “People know how to cook steaks,” said Dave Zino, executive director of the cattlemen’s Beef and Veal Culinary Center.

The Denver was invented after meat and marketing experts spent more than $1.5 million and five years on the largest study anyone had ever done on the edible anatomy of a steer.

The point was to increase the $15.5 billion a year that people spend at the supermarket buying beef. The association thinks consumers may pay $5.99 a pound for a Denver steak. As ground beef, it’s about $2.99.

“This has been an evolution in the way we think about taking apart that beef carcass,” said Chris Calkins, a University of Nebraska professor who was part of the muscle study. “It’s a profound shift.”

This year, the Beef Check-off program, which financed the meat study, will introduce five new cuts from the chuck. Four cuts from the round will be rolled out next year. A handful are already on the market. All of them have new names that are sure to confuse some shoppers and challenge butchers.

Selling the new cuts will mean persuading more than 600 meatpacking plants, thousands of processors and supermarket managers and, at the end of the chain, consumers who are already baffled by the names in the meat case.

Skeptics, who include old-fashioned beef cutters and a new breed of professional cooks who know European butchering techniques, say there is nothing new in a carcass.

Mike Debach, who runs the Leona Meat Plant in Troy, Pa., reviewed the cutting schematics for the Denver. His analysis: “This is just a glorified chuck steak that they cleaned the junk off of.”

Tom Mylan, a butcher who breaks down whole carcasses at Marlow & Daughters in Brooklyn, says the cattlemen are not inventing anything.

“The old Italians and French butchers have been doing this forever,” he said. The surprise, he said, is that it took the big producers this long to figure out how to process and market off-cuts.

“The difference in a good name is worth $3 or $4 a pound,” he said.

Of course, the names have to be good. One wonders if America’s beef roast, the name a focus group has given a new cut of chuck steak, stands a chance of becoming as familiar as prime rib.

The move to remake the supermarket meat case began in 1998, when meat scientists in Nebraska and Florida began pulling apart the chuck and the round, looking for diamonds in the rough.

The researchers studied 39 muscles, isolating ones that had enough tenderness or flavor to sell as inexpensive steaks or roasts.

In one tenderness test, researchers cooked muscles to medium, punched out half-inch plugs of meat and set them in a machine that measures the force it takes to shear them in half. Promising cuts were given names like the Sierra, the Western Griller and the Petite Tender.

“If we can dig out a muscle and use it in a new way that hasn’t been done before, it seems to me we are obligated to give that muscle an identity so someone can understand what it is,” said Dr. Calkins, the Nebraska professor.

Naming cuts of beef is a murky pursuit that is only lightly regulated by the government. Industry guidelines and even some local laws prevent butchers from calling a cut from the shoulder a flank steak or a piece of round a tenderloin. But there is no harm (except perhaps confusion) in giving the name Delmonico steak to any one of several cuts.