Curious about where beef stew without carrots, rib, loin, and brisket come from? Danilo Alfaro has published more than 800 recipes and tutorials focused on making complicated culinary techniques approachable to home cooks. Beef is divided into large sections called primal cuts, which you can see in our beef cuts chart.

These primal beef cuts, or “primals,” are then broken down further into subprimals, or “food-service cuts. These are then sliced and chopped into individual steaks, roasts, and other retail cuts. A side of beef is literally one side of the beef carcass that is split through the backbone. Each side is then halved between the 12th and 13th ribs. The most tender cuts of beef, like the rib and tenderloin, are the ones farthest from the horn and hoof. The toughest areas of the animal are the shoulder and leg muscles because they are worked the most. Consisting of parts of the neck, shoulder blade, and upper arm, beef chuck produces tough but very flavorful cuts of meat.

This primal cut has a good deal of connective tissue. With conventional butchering, the beef chuck is separated from the rib primal between the fifth and sixth ribs. This means that it also contains a few inches of the longissimus dorsi muscle, which is the same tender muscle that rib-eye steaks are made from. Since they’re already tender, steaks and roasts from the beef rib primal can undergo various forms of dry-heat cooking and remain tender. It’s nearly impossible to describe a beef primal cut without discussing adjacent cuts.