Learn about beef knuckle & how to prepare it

If you are a meat enthusiast, a culinary adventurist or simply an individual in search of meat knowledge then Grand Peaks Prime Meats is more than honored to share their love and knowledge of meat in all its forms. Today’s blog is about the sub-primal beef from the beef round, the beef knuckle. Here you can learn about the basic categories of a quality beef knuckle and how to prepare it to excellence.

A good beef knuckle weighs anything between 4 kg to 6.5 kg, depending on the total body weight. The beef knuckle goes by many names from state to state and city to city. To name a few common ones such as the ball of the round, sirloin tip, round tip, tip center, and beef ball tip roast.

No matter what name it goes by in the market where you’re from or how much it weighs, there are four main muscles in the Beef Knuckle:

Rectus femoris
Vastus intermedius
Vastus lateralis
Vastus medialis.

More commonly known to customers in the USA as the tip center, tip side, and tip bottom.

Now here are few tips for cutting the beef knuckle with perfection and ease:

It requires a sharp set of kitchen knives and a bit of practice to efficiently separate all the muscles neatly and it will be quite worthwhile of an exercise to finally produce nice cuts from a large piece of a sub-primal beef, weighing about 4 to 6.5 kg. You need to start with a bit of trimming of the silver skin from each piece and we recommend that these trimmings can be used in beef stock or for pet food so nothing gets wasted.

Even though you can cut some quite good steaks without apportioning the muscles but to truly get the best from your beef knuckle, we recommend that you split it into its constituent muscles and remove the connective tissue.