The Right Way To Cut Beef Skirt To Avoid Tough, Chewy Textures

Hailing from the underside of the cow, the skirt steak offers several appetizing qualities. It's particularly known for its flavor, offering a bold dose of beefy goodness. The cut's also laden with fat, holding strips of it among the muscle tissue. And those strips melt into a moist result. Its unique structure is anything but dense, which enables marinades to permeate and mingle with the meaty flavor.

As such, when prepared properly, skirt steak offers incredible appeal. However, the beef is naturally tough, so it's imperative to prevent chewiness. And one of the most important maneuvers is properly cutting the steak. Due to the length of the muscle fibers, slicing the right direction can make or break this cut. Search for those indented lines in the meat, then slice in with your knife at a perpendicular angle against the grain. Skirt steaks tend to be long, so first cut it into smaller, easier-to-handle sections. Then follow with ultra-thin slices, as small as a quarter-inch across. If you do it right, you can enjoy tender skirt steak bites, whether it's prepared as a perfect carne asada or with a tasty Asian-style marinade.

Curtailing skirt steak's natural chewiness is all in perfecting your technique. That means cooking the beef at high heat for a short amount of time and making sure to cook no higher than medium rare — anything over that can lead to unpleasant chewiness. Additionally, don't forget it's a major mistake to cut into meat right off the grill. Always give your beef a rest before slicing.

And when it's finally time to cut, it's best to take care of it yourself rather than serving larger steak chunks to the guests, who shouldn't even need a steak knife. Even comparing flank steak to skirt steak, skirt is composed of long muscle fibers, which demand extra effort to chew. The idea behind slicing it very thin is to trim them down as much as possible, so once someone takes a bite, there's not much extra chewing energy required. Thankfully, locating the grain on a skirt steak is a straightforward task, and the cut comes in an easy-to-butcher rectangular shape. So if you keep these narrow strands nice and short, you'll quickly start to see the skirt steak's magic.