ensure you
are getting
the right
thing.Hanger Steak
Hanger is like that indie band that hasn’t quite hit Top 40
mainstream status yet but is big enough that everybody and
their mother has heard about it. Most have even given it a
try. For a long, long time, hanger wasn’t even sold to the
general public, reserved mostly for ground beef, or taken
home by the butcher (earning it the nickname “butcher’s
steak”). If you traveled in France, you would have seen it on
bistro menus as the onglet—a popular cut for steak frites. In
the United States, however, your chances of running into it
were much slimmer.
Then, sometime around the late 1990s or early aughts,
chefs caught wind of it and it started appearing on menus of
American bistros and fancy restaurants alike. Chefs liked it
because it offered the full, beefy flavor and richness of more
expensive cuts of meat like rib-eye or strip steak without the
hefty price tag. These days, hanger steak has become so
popular that it’s no longer as cheap as it used to be (after all,
there are only two on each steer, and they aren’t particularly
large), but it still comes in at around half to a third the price
of a typical high-end steak at the supermarket.