Should I not sear and broil eye of round the way that I do filet mignon or chuck tenderloin?

Question

I recently started cooking filet mignon for my wife (I hate steak/beef myself) every once in a while by (1) coating the steak in a melted butter rub (that has a bit of salt and pepper), then (2) searing each side for 2-3 minutes over medium-high heat, and finally (3) broiling in the oven for approximately 8 minutes. The results have been fantastic (or so she tells me), despite my mere aping of some instructions I found online.

After a while, I decided to try another cut, and repeated the same process with some 1-inch thick chuck tenderloin steaks. These happened to curl up quite a bit while searing, but the end result was apparently again quite delicious (and my wife liked their curled up shape to boot :-). So far so good.

Well, I tried the same method with some 1-inch thick eye of round steaks, and the results were quite disappointing. When I seared them, they failed to brown quickly, and perhaps because I then overdid the searing, the steaks came out pretty tough (and visually unappealing too IMO). Should I not have tried to cook this cut this way, or is that aspect just a red herring? There was one other difference: in my previous efforts, I completely neglected the idea of letting the steaks come to room temperature for a while before cooking, whereas this time I let the steaks sit out for a little over 30 minutes before proceeding. But since that is apparently what one is "supposed" to do, I wouldn't think that that would yield my one poor result so far, but I really don't know.

If it's at all possible to determine from the information I've given here, where did I go wrong?

Answer 1

Eye of round is very lean. Very, very lean. So as a steak, it would not stand up very well to any cooking method that gets it much beyond rare. And even then, it's going to be a tough piece of meat. My suggestion would be to prepare that cut differently (such as macerating it and making country fried steak or Swiss steak), or omitting it from your rotation. Your method is sound for preparing a steak, but I would limit it to:

• Tenderloin
• Strip
• Ribeye
• Chuck eye (not chuck steak, which is a tough piece of meat, but chuck eye, which is cut from the eye roll).

If you want cheaper beef, the last in the list is your best bet.