Eating a balanced diet on a college budget can be difficult, but the flat iron steak, a recently developed beef cut, is gaining in popularity for its tenderness, flavor and most of all, affordability.

Alexander Stelzleni, an assistant professor in the animal and dairy science department, assisted in researching this increasingly popular meat product.

“We’d look to see if we cut it in a different way, what’s going to be the eating quality of that muscle,” he said.

Dwain Johnson is the professor of animal science at the University of Florida who developed the flat iron in the late 1990s.

“For about 10 or so years there’s been a decline in demand for beef,” he said. “What the [National Cattlemen’s Beef Association] found was that the middle cuts, the cuts from the rib and loin, were actually going up in demand but the ends, the round and the chuck, were going down in demand about 25 percent.”

Johnson and a team of researchers from both UF and the University of Nebraska answered NCBA’s call for research and began looking for value-added cuts that could bump up the demand for beef.

“We put our heads together and looked at these muscles to see what we could do,” he said. All told, his team researched 37 different types of muscle.

Johnson’s research and muscle profiling led to the creation of the Bovine Myology Web site, which he described as an encyclopedia of beef cattle anatomy and muscle properties.

The infraspinatus muscle consists of a top blade and a bottom blade, with a large seam of connective tissue in between, he said. This connective tissue was one reason consumers shied away from the chicken steak. It also contributed to a lack of tenderness — the connective tissue required low, slow heating to break down and become tender, which could not be achieved by grilling or cooking it as a steak.

Despite the connective tissue, Johnson saw potential in the infraspinatus. It is the second-tenderest muscle, if cooked properly, he said.

The solution, Stelzleni said, was a matter of cutting against the grain.

The flat iron steak is essentially the infraspinatus muscle in the chuck, or shoulder, of a beef animal — but cut in a new way to maximize its muscle properties, Stelzleni said. He said prior to the flat iron’s development, the infraspinatus could have been used in three different ways.

Ryan Crowe (left) of the Meat Technology Center and Alexander Stelzleni pose with a freshly cut flat iron steak. Photo by Wes Blakenship.

“It could be a chuck roast, a chuck steak, or it could be the beef chuck top round steak, commonly referred to as the

chicken steak,” Stelzleni said.

Instead of cutting the infraspinatus into smaller steaks, it was filleted like a fish to remove the connective tissue, and voila — the flat iron steak was born.

Johnson said the flat iron was first picked up by the restaurant and hotel industry but has been slow to catch on with consumers, though it is gaining in popularity.

He said the name “flat iron” was created by a restaurant in Nebraska.

“When you fillet it out, it looks like a flat piece of iron,” Johnson said.

Ryan Crowe, the meat manager at the University’s animal science research college, said the flat iron was comparable to popular higher value cuts.

“It’s very similar to a ribeye steak,” he said. “It has a lot of marbling in it.”

Marbling, or intramuscular fat, helps create flavor, tenderness and juiciness in cuts of beef as it breaks down during proper cooking, Stelzleni said.

A serving of flat iron, which is four ounces raw or three ounces cooked, contains 200 Calories, 110 of those from fat.

“About one-third of that fat is going to be saturated, but of that 12 to 18 percent is going to be stearic acid,” Stelzleni said. He said unlike other saturated fats, stearic acid is cholesterol neutral, neither lowering nor raising a body’s cholesterol levels.

The flat iron has a type of iron known as “heme iron,” which is more absorbable in the human body than iron from plants, he said. Flat irons also contain 96 percent of the daily recommended allowance of vitamin B12, and about half of the daily recommended allowance of zinc, Stelzleni said.

“As part of a balanced diet, include steamed vegetables or a salad with a light dressing, and of course for your starch a small portion of mashed potatoes or baked potato,” he said.

Johnson said the best way was to grill the flat iron for five to seven minutes per side, until it was medium rare.

“It’s a really tender cut so you don’t have to cook it for a long time,” he said, adding as it is grilled, the flat iron plumps as the heat denatures proteins within the muscle.

In addition to eating it prepared as a grilled steak with side dishes, Crowe suggested using flat irons in steak salads or in fajitas.

He said flat irons were sold for $4.99 a pound at the retail meat sale in the Rhodes building every Friday.

Flat irons can be bought off campus as well, for $5.99 a pound at Publix, $4.99 a pound at Kroger and $3.99 a pound at Piggly Wiggly.