Chicken Fried Steak

Today we are talking about cube steak. A cube steak is a tough cut of beef that is tenderized by perforation. The perforation cuts through the connective tissue that makes certain cuts tough. Tough cuts come from parts of the animal that do a lot of work, legs and the like. The more central on the animal you go the more tender and expensive the meat gets. Hence the price and tenderness of beef tenderloin, its about as far from either leg as you can get. Like many things in life though there is a trade-off the tougher cuts have more beefy flavour and a much cheaper price tag. Usually a piece of bottom round cooked quickly in a hot pan would be shoe leather, but perforate that same piece of meat into cube steak and it can be cooked quickly without getting to tough. If you are from Canada, like I am, you may find cube steak labelled as minute steak.

The biscuit was not part of the recipe but I thought it was a nice
addition

This episode had recipes for the two most popular cube steak dishes. The first is known by many different names: country style steak, Salisbury steak, Swiss steak etc. All of them are basically a floured and seared cube steak slow cooked in a brown sauce. This looked pretty good but I went for the Texas staple: chicken fried steak. I remember hearing about this mystery meat when I was younger. Is it steak? Or chicken? Or some kind of mutant chicken-cow hybrid? As cool as a feathered cow would be chicken fried steak is cube steak done has if it is fried chicken. That means breaded and pan fried so it gets a crispy brown crust just like fried chicken. It is usually served with a peppery white gravy, called sawmill gravy. Why it was named after a sawmill I am not sure. Apparently Texans are served up over 800,000 chicken fried steaks per day and I can see why they are pretty darn delicious. My only problem was the gravy was a little bland. I think there was not nearly enough brown bits left in the pan to flavour the gravy. I fixed this with lots of salt and pepper and it actually turned out pretty good. Again I will be honest about my deviations from the recipe, Alton Brown bought a roast, cut steaks and perforated them himself. His reasoning was that in lower quality cube steaks many different pieces of meat can be sticked together. Personally I am not all that bothered my this possibility and it didn't want to go and by the tenderizing thing that he used. Cubing your own cube steaks is a possibility and you may save a little money but I will take my chances with the store bought variety.

Chicken Fried Steak Recipe