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MINUTESTEAKS—70 YEARS HENCE
MY MEMORY WAS JOGGED BY LAUREN BAIR’S ARTICLE “The Underrated Steak I Make When Dinner Has To Be Ready in 10 Minutes,” Simply Recipes, August 25, 2026. Her description of thin-slice top round reminded me of my mom’s job producing “MinuteSteaks,” an invention of a guy named Richard Ruffner back in Cleveland in the 1950s. See “One Bad Ombre and an Untouchable,” SimanaitisSays, February 9, 2017: the Bad Hombre being Al Capone; the Untouchable being Eliot Ness, one of the government agents contributing to Capone’s downfall.
Eliot Ness, 1903–1957, American government agent, U.S. Bureau of Prohibition, 1927–1934; Director of Public Safety for Cleveland, Ohio, 1935–1944. (An acquaintance of my parents; owner of a ’54 Ford convertible missing a rear window.)
The culinary delights of memory were thinly sliced strips of steak with a pocket of ground beef within their two layers. Easy-peasy for mom, but rather more complicated in my attempt to reproduce them 70 years later. Here are tidbits about my quest.
First Attempt—Tasty But…. I bought excellent Japanese Sukiyaki Certified Angus Beef as the sliced strips and Harris Ranch Ground Beef.
However, the sukiyaki slices were thicker than I expected.
With the meatball in place, I continued with the top layer of the sukiyaki slices and waxed paper.
Frying Them Revealed a Flaw, Sorta. They cooked up in a tasty fashion, but the sukiyaki cut was too thick to reproduce mom’s fabled MinuteSteaks.
These tended to separate in the frying.
Tasty, but not mom’s….
Plan 2: Sukiyaki Steak and Broccoli. So there I was with half the pack of sukiyaki steak. Fortunately I had a bunch of broccoli in the fridge and the necessary fixings for a great gravy of soy sauce, mirin, sesame oil, and a dose of La Yu (spicy sesame oil).
A typical stir-fry followed: peanut oil, dash of sesame oil, garlic. Then onions. Then veggies. Then steak/sauce.
A yum combination.
A Search for the Correct Slice. King Beef Ribeye Sliced Curl in my Vons frozen meat case proved to be the nearest to what mom used to layer.
I figured I’d use 3 or 4 slices for each layer, so defrosted enough curls for two MinuteSteaks, one for Daughter Suz, one for me.
The rest was easy-peasy: waxed paper/bottom slices/meatball/top slices/waxed paper, with the requisite smushing and repose in the fridge.
Frying used garlic-enhanced peanut oil, with judgement assessing enough time per side to cook the interior meat.
Just Like Mom Usta Make, Sorta. I was pleased with the Ribeye Curl as basis for these latter-day MinuteSteaks.
Bon appetite. Thanks, mom.
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2026
Different areas different interpretations….I member “minute steak” as machine tenderized thin round steak (maybe 1/4 to 3/8ths inch thick) that cooked in not much more than a couple of minutes in a hot cast iron pan. This in Southern California in the 1950’s. Probably garlic salt instead of garlic, which was reserved for other things.
We attended a Morgan steak roast last summer where we dinned on $42 filet mignom steaks for free. Old dues paid for it. Now back to hamburg.
In the ’50s growing up in a four boy family, Mom used to say: “We were broke, so we ate hamburger for a week!”In the ’70s, it became: “We ate hamburger for a week, so we’re broke!”