The elusive beef cut some chefs can’t resist

By Cathy Erway, The New York Times

When chef Darren Chang was growing up in Arcadia, California, his mother would braise large pots of beef shanks throughout the week, to top bowls of piping-hot noodle soup for dinner, or to roll up in scallion pancakes smeared with hoisin for a quick snack. Tender and jiggly with collagen, and deeply flavored with soy sauce and aromatics, they were always in the refrigerator.

When Chang and chef Travis Masar opened their Taiwanese food stand, Pig and Tiger, in Denver nearly six years ago, they struggled to source the boneless beef shanks for their signature beef noodle soup and Los Angeles-style beef rolls. Most meat purveyors didn’t carry the cut, so the chefs often had to clear out the retail selection at local Asian supermarkets. Masar suggested using brisket or short ribs instead of beef shanks, but Chang shut down the idea.

“There’s an emotional attachment,” Chang said. “I’m usually the one who’s trying to tweak things and try different takes, but for that, no.”

Since moving the restaurant into a brick-and-mortar location last year, the partners finally secured a steady supply of beef foreshanks — their preferred section of the cut — from Gold Canyon Meat, a local wholesaler.

“It’s 100% a part of these dishes, it’s a part of that culture,” said Masar, referring to Taiwanese cooking, “and there’s no replacing it.”

There is no cut of beef quite like the shank. Technically any part of the cow’s legs, these hardworking muscles are strewed with tendon and sinew, which become meltingly soft and gelatinous after a long, slow braise. To fans, this is precisely what makes dishes that utilize it so memorable.

“We just love that texture, and it’s lean,” said Richard Ho, the chef and owner of Ho Foods, a Taiwanese beef noodle soup shop in New York City.

Yet beef shanks are largely absent from major grocery stores in the United States and can be tricky for restaurants to find outside Asian suppliers, requiring chefs to go to great lengths to obtain them.

“I was like, ‘Well, where do I source this thing and what is it even called?’” he said.

After learning as much as he could about it, he sought out a handful of small butchers who cut shank pieces for him. Today, he gets most of his beef shanks from Ends Meat, a whole-animal butcher shop in Brooklyn, which provides its entire stock of beef shanks to Ho Foods.

The partnership is “a perfect relationship,” said John Ratliff, the owner of Ends Meat, because it allows him to turn a profit on a cut that would otherwise be a hard sell.

“In our culture, people aren’t as interested in parts of the animal that have a lot of tendon,” Ratliff said. “If people don’t buy it, it ends up getting ground in a hamburger, which is a horrible use for something that is so special.”

Beef shanks have long been enjoyed in stews and braises around the beef-eating world, as in South Asian nihari, Korean stew sataejjim and northern Italian osso buco.

At Soothr, a Thai restaurant in New York City, the team fills the kitchen’s ovens with more than 16 gallons of boneless beef shanks daily to braise in a broth infused with lemongrass and soy. The shanks are cooled completely before they’re sliced and served in a handful dishes, including green curry, massaman curry and yum nuer, a beef salad with herbs, shallots and chiles.

“Thai people love stewed beef shank,” said Joel Watthanawongwat, the chef and an owner.

Other cuts get a lot of attention because they’re great for steaks, a preparation that is not typical of Thai cuisine, he said. “Beef shanks are not seen as a premium cut, more of an economical cut, but if we put technique or method to make it a little more elevated, it gives it more value,” he said.

Slow-cooking other cuts can result in a mess of falling-apart meat — which is not always a good thing. With shanks, slippery wisps of collagen connect the muscle meat in neat slices that present well, and that collagen also enriches and thickens any soup or curry.

Because tough shanks take such a long time to be rendered tender and palatable, they’ve long been regarded as an affordable (if not unwanted) cut of meat.

Nihari, a slow-cooked meat stew, traditionally comprised cheap cuts like beef or lamb shank cooked with the residual heat of a cooling tandoor, said Chetan Shetty, the chef of Passerine, an Indian restaurant in New York. The dish, once served to soldiers for breakfast, became so popular that it was embraced by the ruling class of the 18th-century Mughal Empire, and it is now the national dish of Pakistan.