Most steak in New Zealand is bought pre-packed. A tray, a plastic film lid, a fixed weight and a fixed thickness decided by someone optimising for a display case rather than for your dinner.

Buying from someone who cuts to order is a different proposition, and the differences are more practical than the word artisan usually suggests.

Thickness is the biggest one

Pre-packed steaks are cut thin. Usually somewhere between 1.5 and 2 centimetres. There are commercial reasons for this. Thinner steaks mean more units from the same primal, they fit standard trays, and they hit a price point that looks reasonable on a shelf.

For cooking, thin is a serious handicap. Building a proper crust takes time at high heat, and during that time the interior is cooking. On a 1.5 centimetre steak, the crust and the fully cooked interior arrive at roughly the same moment, which means a good crust and a pink centre are close to mutually exclusive.

At 3 centimetres, the same sear takes the same time but the interior has barely moved. You have room to work. At 4 centimetres or more you can reverse sear, which gives an almost perfectly even interior and a hard crust.

When you buy cut to order, you specify thickness. This one variable does more for the result than any technique.

You buy weight, not units

Pre-packed means buying in the increments someone else chose. Two steaks in a pack when you want three. A 480 gram tray when you need 700 grams.

Ordering by weight means you get what the meal actually requires. Cooking for five means asking for 1.2 kilograms rather than working out which combination of packs comes closest.

It also means you can specify unusual formats. A single very large steak for two people. A thick cut for a reverse sear and thin ones for sandwiches from the same order. A specific weight for a recipe.

Seam butchery finds more cuts

This is the part that most affects what is available to you rather than how it is packaged.

An industrial cutting pattern breaks a carcass down quickly into standard primals using a consistent set of cuts. It is efficient and it produces uniform product. It also grinds or buries a number of genuinely good muscles, because separating them takes skill and time.

Seam butchery follows the natural separations between muscle groups. It is slower and requires knowing the anatomy, and it yields cuts that a standard pattern does not produce as distinct items. Bavette, flat iron, hanger, picanha, tri-tip and chuck end ribeye all come out of this approach.

These cuts are not obscure for quality reasons. They are obscure because they are awkward to produce at scale. Several of them are among the best value on the entire animal.

Whole animal economics change the pricing

There is an economic point here that affects what you pay.

A retailer buying primals can choose to buy only the popular ones. That means the demand for ribeye and fillet has to be met by buying more of those specific cuts, which pushes their price up, while the rest of the animal is somebody else's problem.

An operation processing whole carcasses has to sell everything. The shins, the shoulders, the mince and the less fashionable steaks all contribute revenue, which means the premium cuts do not have to carry the full cost of the animal on their own.

The practical effect is that direct pricing on premium angus beef steaks is often more competitive than the quality would suggest, and the less familiar cuts are frequently excellent value.

Freshness and handling

Cut to order means cut recently. Pre-packed steak has been cut, trayed, transported and displayed, and every one of those steps happens before you see it.

Exposed cut surfaces oxidise. This is why supermarket steak is packaged in modified atmosphere or wrapped in oxygen permeable film, both of which keep the colour bright for longer than the meat would naturally hold it. The colour is being managed rather than being an honest indicator.

Meat cut to order and vacuum sealed immediately has minimal exposure, and the dark purplish colour of a vacuum pack is the natural state rather than a problem. It blooms bright red within half an hour of opening.

You can ask questions

The underrated advantage. When someone has cut the meat themselves from a carcass they know the origin of, they can answer questions that a shelf cannot.

Which cut suits the method you have in mind. What is eating particularly well at the moment. What thickness for the number of people. Whether to go bone-in. What the fat cap looks like on this particular batch. Whether a cheaper cut would do the job better than the expensive one you were about to buy.

That last one is worth noting. A butcher with a whole carcass to sell has no particular reason to steer you toward the most expensive item, and often will not.

What to specify when ordering

If you are buying cut to order for the first time, useful things to say:

●        The number of people and the occasion. More useful than naming a cut

●        The thickness you want. Three centimetres is a good default for pan or grill. Four or more for a reverse sear

●        The total weight, rather than a number of steaks

●        The cooking method you plan to use, since it determines which cuts suit

●        Whether you want bone-in or boneless

●        Whether you want the fat cap left on, which most people should say yes to

●        Whether you are freezing any of it, so it can be packed in portions

Where this fits with buying online

Ordering online and cutting to order are not opposites. A producer who butchers on site can cut against orders and dispatch, which combines the specificity of a butcher counter with the convenience of delivery.

What to look for is whether weights are given as ranges or per kilogram rather than fixed pack sizes, whether unusual cuts appear in the range, whether thickness or custom requests can be noted with an order, and whether there is a person to email or phone about it.

A range that consists entirely of fixed weight packs of the six most popular cuts is being packed rather than cut.

Matangi Prime Meat butchers its own grass fed Angus on site at its Hastings premises, with a range spanning the familiar steaks alongside bavette, hanger, flat iron, picanha, tri-tip and chuck end ribeye.