Brazilian churrasco is incredibly delicious, but it’s also surprisingly unforgiving. Unlike other regional variations of barbecue, churrasco does not rely on spices and sauces to bring flavor to the meal. Instead, it’s all about the meat, cooked to perfection, sliced, and served.
That means there’s no real room for error. If you overcook the meat, it’s going to lose its flavor. If you cut it the wrong way, it will lose its texture. Moreover, different cuts of meat require, well, different cuts.
So, you don’t just need to be a Brazilian pitmaster to get the churrasco just right: you need to know how to handle a knife.
Fortunately, knife skills are largely universal. There’s no secret Brazilian culinary martial art that gives you special techniques for wielding a knife. It’s all about picking the right tool for the job, knowing where, how, and when to cut, and keeping yourself safe while doing it.
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Understanding Meat and Cutting the Cut
Theory comes before practice. Let’s talk a little about how meat works before we get into how to cut it. Note that we’re primarily talking about beef here, but much of the same advice will apply to any larger animal meats: pork, veal, venison, and anything else with larger, defined muscles will apply. In contrast, you don’t have to worry as much with things like chicken.
The majority of the cuts of meat you get from large animals like cattle are large muscles. Large muscles are made up of numerous muscle fibers, stretching from one end to the other. Think about your own thigh, for example. The muscles stretch from the pelvis to the knee and work primarily in one direction.
When you cut this piece of meat, you have two real options: you can cut with the grain, or you can cut against the grain.
When you cut with the grain, each piece is made of long strands of muscle. When you then eat this piece of meat, you’re chewing these strands, and it ends up being tough, a little stringy, and less flavorful.
When you cut against the grain, you’re instead cutting these strands. The result is a lot of little bits of the strands interlaced with bits of fat from the marbling. This leaves each bite much more tender and flavorful than if you had cut the other way.
In Brazil, we call this contrafile, which simply means “against the grain.” You might find certain cuts of meat called contrafile; this is usually something like strip loin or ribeye, where the cut is much more important for the tenderness and flavor of the finished steak. Other kinds of cuts matter a little less, though it’s still ideal to cut against the grain when serving for the most tender bites.
The good news is if you’re buying cuts of meat that are already sliced into steaks – like the cuts we sell in our butcher shop – they’re already cut against the grain for you.
If you have a larger cut of meat and you want to cut your own steaks, you’ll need to identify the direction of the grain before you cut. That means looking closely at the meat.
What you’re looking for are the lines that indicate what direction the muscle fibers are aligned. You can often tell by looking at the marbling, as well; if the fat is long, thin lines, that’s the direction of the grain. If it’s more dots and spots, that’s against the grain. You can see many guides and photos, like this one, elsewhere online as well.
Steaks or Strips? How to Cut the Meat
Another thing you want to know is how you’re going to cut the meat before you cook it. After all, you aren’t putting a whole primal cut (that is, the overall chunk of meat before it’s divided) on a skewer and cooking it.
Generally speaking, you have a few main options.
- Large steaks. A thick steak, usually a couple of inches thick, makes for a significant gradient in cooking. The outside cooks while the inside remains rare. In churrasco, this is common because we often serve our cuts rodizio style, which means cutting slices off of the piece of meat rather than offering a whole steak at once. When serving thick steaks like this, it can be difficult to bring the interior up to food-safe temperatures without wildly overcooking the outside, so it would need to be cooked to order.
- Normal steaks. When you go to an American steakhouse and order a steak, chances are this is what you’re going to get. It will be anywhere from half an inch to an inch thick. This broad, thinner kind of steak cooks with enough of a gradient that you can have a nice Maillard crust on the outside while the inside is still rare, medium, or otherwise still tender and flavorful. This is a little less common with Brazilian steaks due to the method of cooking on a skewer.
- Thin strips. Some cuts of meat don’t work all that well as steaks and need to be cut into smaller strips. You can even find our beloved picanha cut this way, sometimes; it’s called picanha em tiras. These pieces can be very tender and flavorful but cook very quickly and are easy to monitor. You don’t see this in churrasco, though; it’s more what you would see when you’re cutting steak to add to a sandwich, salad, or other dish.
There are other ways to cut and cook beef as well, of course, but these are the most common options found in Brazil and around the world. For example, for a Mexican favorite, a larger beef roast can be slow-cooked until all of the connective tissues render out, leaving an easily shredded beef similar to pulled pork. This can then be fried lightly in a skillet for a crispy shredded meat used in things like carnitas. It’s not Brazilian, but it’s delicious and just goes to show how many different ways there are to cook meat.
As mentioned above, Brazilian churrasco generally goes for thicker cuts because of the way we cook and serve the steaks. You’re free to adapt to a size that better fits your purposes, though; you don’t need to worry about the serving method when you’re only cooking for yourself, after all.
The Right Tool for the Job
A key part of knife skills is having the right knife to do the job.
If you’ve ever been to a Texas de Brazil location, you’ll probably have noticed that our gauchos (the cowboys who cook and serve the meat) carry large knives. These knives have ten-inch blades, putting them on the larger end of chef’s knives. The blades are mostly flat, and the handle is slightly curved. They also have leather sheaths so our gauchos can carry them throughout the dining room safely.
If you want to use the exact knives our gauchos use, you can buy them directly from our market.
If you search for “churrasco knife” online, you’ll find a lot of different variations. Some are huge and almost like machetes or cleavers. Others have flamboyant curves to the blades. Still others are a lot more like your typical chef’s knife.
What kind of knife is the best?
Truthfully, it doesn’t matter quite as much as you might think. The right knife has three main qualities.
- It’s large enough to cut through the cuts of meat you use without needing to make multiple slices; a knife that’s too small doesn’t do the job properly and leaves a raggedy cut and can make a mess.
- It’s made from high-quality steel, so it holds an edge well and can stay sharp with proper maintenance.
- It’s not serrated. Serrated knives work best for crusty breads and baked goods; you should never need them for meat. If you’re used to using a serrated knife on meat, you’re treating it more like a saw than a knife, and it means your normal knives aren’t sharp enough.
You also want to avoid a knife that’s too big because the more excess blade you have hanging around, the harder it is to wield effectively.
Keeping your knife sharp
People often think of a sharp knife as a dangerous knife. While it’s true that a sharp knife is dangerous – it’s designed to cut through things, after all – a leading cause of knife accidents in the kitchen happens because a knife is too dull. A dull knife requires more force to cut through foods, is more likely to get caught or behave unpredictably, and can do more damage if it goes awry.
There’s a ton of debate and a ton of disagreement on how and when to sharpen your knives. It can also depend on how often you use your knives, what they cut, and even what they’re made out of.
If you’ve seen a chef run their knife along a metal rod before cutting, this is known as honing. Honing is something you should do pretty much every time you use your knife to keep it as sharp as possible for as long as possible.
Occasionally, your knives will get dull and will need a more thorough sharpening. You can send them off to be sharpened, or you can buy a couple of whetstones and learn how to sharpen them yourself. It’s not difficult, and it’s kind of meditative, so it can be a great skill to learn.
There are also a thousand different knife-sharpening gadgets on the market, like pull-through knife sharpeners. These often do more harm than good; they’ll make a knife sharp temporarily, but they effectively add micro-serrations and can ruin the edge of a knife long-term.
Keeping your hands safe
Normal knife skills are all about learning how to hold your knife, hold your meat, and cut the food without cutting yourself. There are a million guides to this, from Masterclass courses to free resources, but they all come down to the same core concepts.
With churrasco, since we cook on skewers, we don’t have these sorts of problems. Meat held on a skewer can be cut easily and safely with a sharp knife, and the slices fall nicely onto a tray (or are caught by a diner with tongs, as in our restaurant).
The key, in any case, is to be able to keep your hands away from the blade in a safe way. The last thing you need is to cut a finger when you’re trying to serve dinner!
If you’re using a cutting board and cutting meat that way, the key is to keep your fingertips curled back. You keep the broad side of the knife against your knuckles to use as a guide; since your fingertips are curled back, no part of your hand can extend past that point, so you can’t accidentally cut yourself as long as you don’t raise the knife too high.
Oh, also, don’t try to go too fast. All of those cooking shows with professional chefs chopping a mile a minute? They’ve spent years or decades training how to do that. If you try, you’ll end up hurting yourself. Take it slow and careful; your fingers will thank you.
See How It’s Done
It can be difficult to discuss and describe all of this in text form, so why not see how it all works in person? You can see first-hand how our gauchos handle their knives and serve their cuts if you come to your nearest Texas de Brazil location. Plus, you can look at different cuts of meat properly cut against the grain and see how it all looks when done properly. And enjoy a delicious meal, of course!
If you have the concepts down, then you can buy some meat and a knife from our shop, fire up your own grill, and cook churrasco like a pro. You might not get it right the first time, and that’s okay; it’s a skill you learn over time and one that’s very much worth building up. You’ll love it, trust us!
