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Vanna Tran is a home cook who started cooking with her mother at a very young age. She has catered events and hosted pop-up dinners in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 5 years. There are 11 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. How marks an article as reader-approved once it receives enough positive feedback.

This article has been viewed 1,086,159 times. Some cuts of beef can be very tough, especially if you prefer your meat well done. If you don’t want to shell out a lot of money for a more expensive cut of meat, you can tenderize a less expensive cut to make it more palatable. Try mechanical or thermal methods, or if you prefer, you can use chemical methods, such as adding as salt, baking soda, or dairy to tenderize your beef. Place the beef between wax paper and pound it for a few minutes.

The wax paper protects the meat and your counter. Pound the beef with anything heavy you have on hand, from a kitchen mallet to a heavy skillet or rolling pin. Pounding the meat makes it softer, as well as thinner. This method works best on whole cuts of beef. Pound the meat for 2-3 minutes with a spiked meat mallet for frying. Lay the piece of whole meat on a cutting board. Pound one side with the spiked mallet until it thins out.

Turn it over and repeat the process. This process breaks up the connective tissues in the meat. While it isn’t good for things like grilled steak, it works well for a meat that’s breaded, like chicken-fried steak. Take a knife, and make diagonal cuts across the top of the meat in one direction, at an angle to the grain. Turn it, and make perpendicular cuts across the meat the other way. This method breaks up some of the longer muscle fibers, making it taste a bit more tender. It works well on cheap steak cuts.