The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

weak muscles like these will be soft and tender no
matter how you slice ’em. Inexpensive cuts, like skirt
steak, hanger steak (shown above), or flank, have
thicker muscle fiber bundles with a clearly defined
grain.
These fibers are tough cookies—they have to be.
Their job is to move the moving parts of an animal
that is much much bigger than you. Try to tear a
single muscle fiber by stretching it along its length,
and you’ll have a pretty hard time. But pulling
individual muscle fibers apart from one another is
relatively easy. So, before putting a piece of flank,
hanger, or skirt steak in your mouth, the goal should
be to shorten those muscle fibers as much as possible
with the help of a sharp knife. If you cut with your
knife parallel to the grain, you end up with long
muscle fibers that are tough for your teeth to tear
through. Slicing the meat thinly against the grain,
however, delivers very short pieces of muscle fiber
that are barely held together. Take a look below at
the difference between slicing with the grain (on the
left) and slicing against the grain (on the right):