To find the elusive chuck eye steak, look for a roast matching the configuration of Rib 5.
I was lucky in my experiment breaking down a chuck roast that I got one with a nice chuck eye steak included. This is by no means guaranteed. According to this source, there are no more than 2-3 chuck eye steaks per side and you can expect that some of these will be harvested and sold as such. That’s one reason the chuck roasts I saw on sale were so mysterious to me: couldn’t find the elusive chuck eye steak because it wasn’t there.
Also lucky, this week Certified Angus boneless chuck roasts dropped to an irresistible $3.99 a pound at my local market. You can’t go wrong at that price because if you don’t get the cuts you want you will still have some nice stew meat or you can turn the scraps into a pot roast. I took the attached diagram from Texas A&M to my butcher case and spent a good hour perusing the roasts (to the irritation of the butcher who was restocking).
It’s now clear I’m looking for a roast with a cradle of fat and a clear separation below a steak at the top. I’d lucked into such a roast previously and found another today. A roast without such delineation is going to be from further forward on the animal and will provide some good eating (the roast I grabbed yesterday somehow yielded a nice flatiron) but not the elusive chuck eye.
If you want to research further, here is the scholarly article that yielded the above diagram. This article ranks beef muscles for tenderness. This industry fact sheet has another tenderness ranking. (The longissimus, which makes up the chuck eye steak, is oddly not among them.) Or you could just do what I did: buy a bunch of meat, get out your knife and your cutting board, and dig in.
When I was growing up down on Long Island….my mother used to buy the chuck eye steak but it was called minute steak….I’m pretty sure they were one and the same…
That’s interesting. We had minute steaks in Texas but as I recall they were thin and pounded out, suggesting they came from a less-tender muscle. I googled “minute steak” and there are conflicting descriptions so I guess it can be whatever the butcher (or the cook) wants it to be, key being it cooks very fast.
In order to retain my nom de (du?) BMF I’m going to have document this, but yes minute and delmonico steak are among other AKAs for chuckeye. I did see $3.99, I think $4.99 for CAB, chuck roasts but picked through my stores selection of what I call the Micro Chuckeye Steak, $5.99. Small, randomly cut. Stirfy, steak ‘n eggs, oh well.. And the minute steaks from my childhood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steak-umm Or such like. Thanks for those nice PDFs.
Dave, you will forever be Chuckeye Dave as the reader who once upon a time brought our attention to this neglected cut. I had not realized some call it a Delmonico and in fact there is a chain called Delmonico that says Delmonico is a ribeye. At the opposite end of the spectrum is a guy on Youtube who is the top search result for “breaking down a chuck roast” and that guy describes a “chuck steak” that appears to be a chuckeye plus random bits. I am now becoming quite possessive of the formal description of a chuck eye steak and feel like we need to fight for this.