How To Slice Meat And Why It Matters

Meat, whether it’s pork, beef, or chicken, is delicious, especially when these meats are tender and juicy. However, it’s not always the cut of the meat that is important when it comes to how tender it is. Sometimes, it’s all about how you slice or cut the meat that is just as important. 

How to cut raw meat or how to slice meat is a skill that butchers are trained to do well. Not only do butchers or meat cutters know how to prepare the carcass into the marketable meat cuts that we find in the display case, but they also know how to cut meat right. 

The most basic of these meat cutting skills is how to process meat cuts into tender cuts for customers. This job also includes creating the meats cuts that you request such as thicker pork chops for the grill, deboning a whole chicken for a rellenong manok, or removing the bones from beef to make boneless ribeye steaks. 

If you want to know how to cut raw meat properly, here’s what you should know: 

Photo by Bianca Laxamana

1 Use a sharp knife. 

You know that most new knives are super sharp and this is the selling point. These need to be sharp because nobody buys a “dull” knife. That’s why after the initial sharpness is gone, you need to know how to sharpen the knife or have it sharpened professionally. 

If you want to learn how to sharpen your knife, you will need a whetstone and the know-how to do it right. Watch this video to see how it’s done and how to maintain your knife with its sharpest edge, plus a video on how to properly your knife: 

Photo by Shutterstock

2 Look for the “grain”. 

The “grain” of the meat is basically how the muscles are aligned or the way the muscles are lined up. You need to know in which direction the grain of the meat is going. This is how you will know how to slice the meat properly. 

Photo by Miguel Nacianceno

3 Slice against the grain. 

You have probably heard this phrase before applied to steaks but it’s just as important to raw meat as to cooked meat. 

To slice meat to make tender cuts, you need to slice against the grain. Once you have identified the direction of the grain, you just need to slice across it. All this means is that you are making those strands of muscles shorter. The shorter the grain is or the strands of muscles are, the more tender the meat cut will be once cooked. 

Once you learn how to slice meat so that it’s always tender when cooked, you can prepare your own meat cuts for your caldereta or menudo. 

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