Use Ina Garten's Hack For Easy Thin-Sliced Meat

Razor-thin slices of meat are the hallmark of a good Korean-style beef stir fry, pork hot pot, or a delicate and tender beef carpaccio that needs to be ⅛ inch thick. But slicing through slippery, squishy, raw meat is not an easy task, let alone getting portions that are the thickness of a piece of tissue paper. Instead, the blade of the knife produces cuts that are jagged and not uniform in size, that is, unless you adopt Ina Garten's simple hack. In Barefoot Contessa's "Cook Like A Pro" cookbook, Garten notes that freezing raw meat before you slice it makes the job much easier. 

This hack works because when meat is cold, it becomes firm, giving you greater control with your knife and ultimately producing a cleaner, more consistent slice. However, you do not want to allow your meat to freeze until it is rock solid, or you won't be able to get your knife through it. You only want it to be partially frozen or well-chilled. This can take as little as 30 minutes and works on pretty much any protein you are cutting up, including tri-tip, which is one of the trickiest cuts of steak to slice.

There are a couple of benefits to chilling your meat before taking a knife to it and slicing it. First, because this trick allows you greater quality control, yielding slices that are all about the same size and thickness, they will cook quickly and at the same rate, which is key for fast-cooking dishes. Secondly, when you bite into these thin slices, you will find them to be more tender because there are fewer muscle fibers for your teeth to shred, especially if you've cut your meat against the grain.

Make certain you've sharpened your knife blade before you start because cutting ingredients with a dull knife is dangerous. Be sure to reach for a butcher's or chef's knife when working with raw meat; these tools were designed for heavy-duty cutting. Just how thin can you get your meat when you use this technique? To temper expectations, Ina Garten does concede that you will never achieve that paper-thin width when you do it by hand, but it will make your life much simpler, and it's still one of the best ways to slice meat for a Philly cheesesteak.