Redditors Are Cracking Up Over An Unusually-Shaped Costco Arrachera Steak

It's always a riot when food comes out looking like something else — think heart-shaped berries, braided carrots that appear to be embracing, or faces in toast, for example. Sometimes, of course, it looks a little less suitable for public consumption — much like the arrachera steak one Costco shopper cooked up.

The steak in question garnered quite a bit of attention on the Costco Subreddit. The original poster presented a photo with the caption, "Costco's arrachera skirt steak. I think someone swapped it out with something else lol" and the people of the Internet, as they are wont to do, offered up opinions of what the steak in question looks like instead. The beef seems to have curled in on itself while cooking, leading it to look tubular and quite rude, as no one failed to point out.

The leading comments suggest that it looks like the Facehugger from "Alien," though it doesn't have the grabby scorpion-like arms. It was also compared to a particular part of an elephant's, donkey's, or giraffe's anatomy. Or an esophagus. Or Godzilla's intestine. The most upvoted comment is of a clip from the "Spongebob Squarepants" episode titled "Chocolate with Nuts/Mermaidman and Barnacleboy V," claiming it looks like an old fish/squid woman character who is nothing but a shriveled, brown, tubular body with an amorphous head, no teeth, and pitch black eyes. Another commenter's assessment hit the nail on the head: "Sweet mercy ... That's uncomfortable to look at."

In various parts of Mexico, "arrachera" steak can refer to different cuts of meat; generally, though, it's a cut called "skirt steak." The skirt steak is the tough, lean, muscular diaphragm of the cow. It's a long, thin cut separated into the inside and outside parts; the outside skirt is wider than the inside. Both are very fibrous cuts and respond well to (and need) a robust and tenderizing marinade.

Unequivocally the strangest cut of meat I've ever seen
by
u/Maelstrom116 in
Costco

The arrachera available at Costco is the inside cut of skirt steak. It comes from RYC Foods, preseasoned in the package, and is tenderized with papaya enzymes. Though customers have reported that it usually comprises two thin, flat, wide pieces of skirt steak per package, there seems to be some real variation in what gets sold. Some packages have been seen to include one particularly long, thin piece that would shrink and curl up a bit as the proteins cook. A commenter suggests that perhaps the steak's silverskin or membrane hadn't been properly removed. Silverskin is a tough connective tissue that doesn't melt down during cooking like fat. If the skirt steak wasn't properly trimmed, it's very likely that a long, thin piece would be contorted into a strange shape as it cooked. Without seeing a picture of the raw meat before it went on the grill, we'll never truly know — but this seems to be the prevailing theory for why this particular arrachera is so NSFW.