Why hand chopped steak Tartare?

Steak Tartare is featured in our L.A. Weekender and inspired by the incredible and iconic Musso and Frank’ s steakhouse, one of our favorite spots of all time.

Classic Steak Tartare is an undeniable luxury. The flavor of quality beef, so good that you don’t even want to cook it. The tender texture of minced meat. The luscious fat of the egg yolk. The piquancy of cornichon and shallot. It's one of those simple foods that relies on a bit of technique to execute well, but if you can pull it off is an absolute delight. Here is a classic recipe for Steak Tartare that you can execute with about as much difficulty as it takes to make a simple salad.

Why do we hand chop tartare? When we eat at restaurants, we see a lot of emphasis put on food made by hand. Handmade pasta, handmade bread, hand-churned butter. This is partly done to show eaters that their food  was not mass produced in a factory like so much of what is available today. There is a degree exclusivity to handmade products, their scarcity and difficulty to produce make them desirable as a rare item. However, the real value of handmade products is the finesse and knowledge that goes into making them. If a food is crafted by hand you can control it. You can select desirable traits and emphasize them, while diminishing or removing that which is undesirable. It is all about creating food thoughtfully. When you read on a menu that your Steak Tartare is “hand cut” it is not just a marketing gimmick. It is an indication that this simple dish has been prepared thoughtfully and with consideration for quality.

Some restaurants choose to process their meat for tartare through a meat grinder in the same fashion as you would when preparing a hamburger. We find that this method has several drawbacks. The first issue is textural. Raw ground meat has a mealy, pasty texture. Processing in a meat grinder smashes and tears all the muscle fibers, leaving none of the pleasurable toothsomeness that we aim to preserve in tartare. It is also inadvisable to simply purchase raw ground beef. When a butcher processes ground beef, they take pieces of meat from all parts of the animal, some of which may have been near the surface and are vulnerable to contamination. We recommend buying a whole muscle, like tenderloin or ribeye, which are from the interior of the cow and have a far lesser chance of being a vector for food borne illness.    

We believe that the best way to serve tartare is with hand-chopped beef. If you serve a big chunk of raw beef it will be horrible, tough and unseasoned. Cooking meat breaks down fat and proteins in the meat, making it more tender. But if you want to eat raw meat it must be cut into small pieces. The texture of beef diced with a knife is small enough to have none of the unpleasant chew that a big piece of raw meat has, while still offering the pleasant mouthfeel of distinct, cool cubes. Hand minced beef also looks lovely. Uniform cubes of rosy-red beef is one of the great aesthetic pleasures of cuisine.