Flat irons are growing in popularity because they offer tender, tasty meat at a great price. Consumers usually see just the pre-cut steaks in stores, but cutting whole flat irons into steaks is easy once you know the technique.

The key is that flat irons have a tough membrane running through the center that you want to cut out – once you do that, slicing each half into flat iron steaks is simple.

Here’s how:

We have a flatiron cut here, we need to take out mostly the middle part which is all silver skin; it’s going to run the whole way, from here to here, and there’s this triangular cut at the top which we need to take off.

First, I’m going to just trim up any silver skin, which is that shiny stuff that will never be tender – this stuff is like bubble gum, so we’re going to get rid of that.

This looks pretty clean otherwise. We’ll look at both sides. This looks like it’s already been trimmed up a little bit. There’s a little bit of a piece here I’m going to take off, because you can see the silver right underneath it. We’re going to that little cut off, and you can use all this for stocks or sauce-making – you can add to sauces – because there’s great flavor in there.

There’s another cut right up here – you can see the line of silver skin right here, which shows you where to cut. So you’re just going to follow that line. That triangular piece comes off, and that reveals the silver skin which you can see really clearly.

If you look right here, you can kind of see a line right there, and you want to use your knife and kind of take out this whole midpiece and follow it all the way down.

I left a tiny bit of silver right here so I’m just going to trim that off. That is one piece.

And you see silver skin from here underneath this meat all the way through here. So I’m going to take my knife [slices down length of cut]. So this is all silver skin right here. And this part, we just put over here. You want to trim up any bits of silver you have left.

So the way it works is, you have silver skin in between and here, so that makes the whole cut. You want to get rid of this middle part. And then you cut off the ends – use this for stew meat as well. Then you can cut this into steaks.

These are six flatiron steaks.