Objective:
A cost effective and simplistic carnivorous adventure of breaking down a whole beef Eye Of Round and to provide practical delicious uses for this type of lean cost-effective beef. Eye Of Round is, generally, quite lean and tends to dry out very quickly. Also, the price of beef round is now lower than beef pot roasts, which takes a considerable amount of time to cook. With that in mind, there are several advantages to this very lean and flavorful beef.
Low cost in bulk or whole Eye of Round roast.
Longer shelf life if the Eye of Round is vacuum packed.
Cut the whole Eye Of Round suited your recipes/uses.
Cut steaks and roast to your preference.
Note: When selecting any cut of beef look for fat marbled within the muscle fibers. This marbling is clearly seen in meat as lines of white fat. This fat will help to keep the steaks and roasts moist, tender and flavorful. Fat is flavor period.
**The exception to this rule is when you're making beef jerky. For jerky lean is king.
The Eye Of Round roast pictured was almost 6 Lbs. or 2.7 kg, from which I determined, I can make four meals and one snack. Check back to see my future great culinary adventures using my broken down, frozen Eye Of Round cost effective meals.
Minute steak
Beef Stew
Hamburger
Snack
Beef Jerky
Note: After removing the vacuum bag and drying off the meat with a paper towel. Notice the white silvery/shinny connective (silver skin) tissue on the right side. This silver skin is very tough and will not beak down without over cooking the lean Eye of Round roast or steak.
Also do not be tempted to grind the silver skin into any beef grinds as this will lower the quality of the product you’re creating at home.
There are different approaches to removing silver skin from your steak, roast or beef jerky. Since I was dividing the Eye of Round into manageable pieces. Insert the sharp knife between the silver skin, fat and meat. Simply apply pressure to the knife parallel to the cutting board. With practice you will quickly find cutting meat and the membrane that runs between meat and other layers such as sliver skin and fat is much easier to cut. I sometimes wonder if silver skin has other uses because it is so darn tough.
For slicing Eye of round steaks, I prefer long bladed knife for clean straight cuts.
Eye of round cut into a variety of ways. Starting from the top left is beef stew (saved fat for browning stew). top right is steaks, bottom right is beef for ground Eye of round, bottom left is for beef jerky.
Tag and wrap up your Eye of Round. Name and date each portion. Once they are frozen it is very difficult to tell which is which. I opted for storage plastic bags as these beef items will not be in the freezer long. If the beef was to be stored in the freezer for more than a month, I prefer using a vacuum packer.
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