Which steak should I buy?

Steaks come from the muscles that did the least work, which run along the back and the top of the hindquarter. How much fat each carries and how little it moved decides everything about how it eats, and the diagram shows where each one sits.

Step by step

1. Fillet: buy it for tenderness and nothing else.A slender muscle tucked under the spine that does almost no work. Extremely tender, very lean and mild to the point of blandness. It is the most expensive cut per kilo and the one most people find least interesting to eat.
2. Sirloin: the reliable middle.From the back behind the ribs, with a strip of fat along one edge. Firm bite, good beefy flavour, enough fat to be forgiving. If you want one steak to be good at everything, this is it. Render the fat edge by standing the steak on it in the pan first.
3. Ribeye: buy it for flavour and fat.From the fore rib, heavily marbled with a distinct eye of fat in the middle. The most flavoursome common steak and the most forgiving of a minute too long, because the fat renders and lubricates it. Needs slightly longer and slightly lower heat than sirloin so the fat has time to melt.
4. Rump: the best value on the counter.From the top of the hindquarter, made of several muscles with different grain directions. Chewier and much more beefy than sirloin for considerably less money. Cook no further than medium rare and slice it across the grain to serve.
5. T-bone and porterhouse: two steaks on one bone.A cross-section through the sirloin and the fillet with the vertebra between them. A porterhouse is the same cut further back, with a larger fillet portion. They cook unevenly by design — the fillet side cooks faster — so keep the fillet side away from the hottest part of the pan or grill.
6. Buy thickness, not weight.Around three centimetres or more lets you build a crust before the middle overcooks. Below about two, the inside is done before the outside has browned and no technique fixes it. One thick steak shared between two people beats two thin ones every time.
7. Look for marbling and a dry surface.Fine flecks of fat through the muscle, not just a rim around it. A dry surface sears; a wet one steams. If the tray holds a pool of liquid, the steak has already lost moisture and will brown badly.

Tips

• Rump cap, sold as picanha, is the fat-covered top of the rump. Superb value, big flavour, and it can be roasted whole as well as cut into steaks.
• Bone-in steaks — côte de boeuf, T-bone — take longer and cook more gently near the bone. They are better suited to the reverse-sear method than to a pan alone.
• Buy from the same counter twice and ask what came in that week. Ageing and handling vary far more between suppliers than between adjacent cuts.

Common mistakes

• Buying fillet for a special occasion by default — It is the most expensive and the mildest. If the point is a memorable steak, a thick ribeye or a bone-in sirloin gives more for less.
• Buying two thin steaks instead of one thick one for the same money — Thickness is what makes a crust and a pink middle possible at the same time. Thin steaks are a different, worse dish.

Questions people ask