How You Should Prep Steak To Make Meal Planning A Breeze

Planning your meal in advance is easier when you're working with easy foods, especially when you're working with a slow cooker. Beef is a relatively tough beast, but it's doable. You can cook ground beef in a slow cooker or you can prep a steak by letting it simmer in there while you're off elsewhere. Certain cuts of steak are easier to cook at home than others, but there are some universals to keep in mind. For some advice, we spoke to Orlando Trejo, executive chef at Secrets Moxché in Mexico. 

When we asked Trejo about the best cuts of steak for a slow cooker, he said his favorite choice is short rib: a fatty, marbled cut of beef which is still tough enough to tenderize well in a slow cooker. Trejo recommends slow cooking the short rib with a little bit of onion and candied garlic added to the pot to add flavor while the beef is tenderizing. For a simple steak, even just scattering some salt and pepper into the slow cooker will help provide you with plenty of flavor since short rib itself is already so flavorful. How long you want to cook it for will depend on what cut of beef you use, so keep that in mind.

Some steak enthusiasts insist that slow cooking is best for tenderizing cheap cuts of meat, so a cut of beef with lots of connective tissue like chuck or brisket should fare just fine on low heat. On the other hand, less fatty cuts typically don't fare well when cooked too far in advance. Those lean cuts (like a filet from the tenderloin) do not belong in a slow cooker because you're very likely to dry them out. Leaner cuts of meat generally require shorter cooking times because they have such a small amount of fat with which to provide moisture.

With those basics out of the way, we move into a bigger question: What should you do with all this steak you've cooked up? Trejo suggests steak tacos for breakfast or a pulled beef sandwich for dinner. A classic breakfast item is a steak and eggs taco with some cheese and a bit of hot sauce. Alternatively, he says a recipe which never fails him is steak in beef broth, red wine, and mirepoix (a diced mixture of onion, carrot, celery). If you do dry out the beef by accident the first time around, broth or soup isn't actually a great way to mask its dryness — you might be better off pureeing it for ravioli or dumpling fillings.