How Many Calories in Beef Cube Steak?

One cooked beef cube steak — the regular 160 g size USDA measures — is 299 calories, or 187 per 100 g. A 4 oz (113 g) serving on the plate comes to 211. The package in your cart tells a different story: 4 oz of the same steak raw reads 140 on a Tyson label, and that gap is where most people lose the count.

You'd need to walk about 60 minutes to burn the 299 calories in a regular 160 g cooked steak.

On this page

• Cube steak quick facts
• The package number and the plate number
• Portions, from one slice to a thick steak
• Raw, cooked and floured
• Where the sodium actually comes from
• The cup of diced beef trap
• How does cube steak compare
• Most popular cube steak brands
• FAQ

Cube steak quick facts

The reference here is the steak as it leaves the skillet: USDA FoodData Central 2705826, "Beef, steak, cube," cooked. Nobody eats cube steak raw, so the cooked record is the one that describes what is actually on the fork. The serving column is USDA's "regular" steak, 160 g.

% Daily Value is based on a 2,000-calorie diet.

One row carries the whole page. Protein is 46.1 g in a single steak, 92% of the day, out of a serving that supplies about 15% of a 2,000-calorie day. Very few things on a dinner plate move that fast.

Two lines are missing from the panel on purpose. USDA does not publish an added-sugars figure for this record, and plain beef has none by definition — but a zero would claim a measurement nobody made. Trans fat is absent for the same reason. What the record does carry sits here instead: 133 mg of cholesterol per steak (44% of the FDA Daily Value) and 667 mg of potassium, about 14%.

Thickness varies more than the name suggests, so the steak in the skillet above may not be the steak USDA weighed. The three sizes it measures are thin at 120 g, regular at 160 g and thick at 240 g.

The package number and the plate number

Cube steak is top round that has been driven through a mechanical tenderizer, which is why it costs what it costs. It is also why the raw and cooked numbers refuse to agree.

Weigh 4 oz of it raw, straight from the tray, and the Tyson label puts that at 125 calories per 100 g — 140 calories for the package portion. Cook it, weigh 4 oz again, and the same measure is 211. That is 71 calories of difference for an identical number on the scale, and it runs in the direction nobody expects: after cooking, every gram carries more, because water leaves the pan while the protein and fat stay behind in less space.

The supermarket makes it worse. The second branded cube steak in USDA's files runs 196 calories per 100 g raw, so 4 oz of it is 220 — well over half again the Tyson figure, for a cut with the same name. The difference is fat trim, not measurement error. Two packages, two very different steaks.

The rule that survives all of this is short. Log the state you weighed. Raw on the scale means the raw record; cooked on the plate means 187 per 100 g. Mixing them is a 50% error on a single dinner, and it is the reason a "quarter pound" of cube steak is one of the least reliable phrases in a food diary.

Portions, from one slice to a thick steak

Every row below is cooked meat at 187 calories per 100 g. The steak, slice and cup weights are USDA's own; the 4 oz and 1 oz rows are our own scaling from that 187:

Thickness decides more here than the cut ever does. A thin steak is 224 calories and a thick one is 449 — double, from the same animal, the same seasoning and the same pan. For scale, the entire spread between cube steak and a fatty chuck steak is 38 calories per 100 g.

That makes the useful question at the meat counter "how thick" rather than "how lean." Two thin steaks weigh what one thick steak weighs and land within a calorie of it, 448 against 449 — the size of the piece is doing all the work, and the label on the package none of it.

Raw, cooked and floured

Four versions turn up in American kitchens, and only one of them is the number on the front of this page.

The last two rows are the parent cut, cooked whole rather than tenderized, and they are worth knowing because they bracket the cooking method. Broiled and untouched, top round is 201 per 100 g. Dredged in flour and pan-fried, it is 228 — and it picks up 2.03 g of carbohydrate per 100 g, the only carbohydrate worth logging anywhere in this article. Both 3 oz servings in that table are our own scaling from the per-100 g figures; the 4 oz rows are the label's own portion.

That flour row is the closest honest stand-in for country-fried steak, and it is not close enough to call the dish. There is no USDA record for cube steak in a full batter under cream gravy, so the number for that plate is not in this data and is not invented here. What the pan-fried row does tell you is the direction: light flour and a hot skillet cost roughly 27 calories per 100 g of meat. A thick batter, a deep fryer and a ladle of gravy cost considerably more than that, and they belong to the gravy, not the beef.

Where the sodium actually comes from

Here is the finding that changes how you cook this steak rather than how you log it.

The meat itself is nearly sodium-free. Raw top round, the cut cube steak is made from, is 56 to 60 mg per 100 g. Broil it plain, without touching the salt, and USDA measures 40 to 41 mg — under 2% of the Daily Value in a 3 oz serving.

The cooked cube steak record, which reflects how Americans season it in real kitchens, is 379 mg per 100 g. That works out to 606 mg in one regular steak, 26% of the day, or roughly a quarter teaspoon of table salt.

Do the subtraction and the picture is stark: about 89% of the sodium in a cooked cube steak was put there by whoever cooked it. Not the packer, not the animal. The shaker.

The practical upside is that it is the easiest number on the page to move. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans keep adults under 2,300 mg of sodium a day, and a cube steak seasoned with a light hand instead of a heavy one gives back several hundred milligrams without touching a single calorie. Saturated fat needs no such rescue: 3.4 g per steak is 17% of the Daily Value, modest for a beef dinner.

The cup of diced beef trap

Recipes call for a cup of diced beef and calorie trackers accept it, so it deserves its own warning.

One cup of diced cube steak weighs 135 g and comes to 252 calories — less than a single regular steak at 160 g and 299. A cup sounds like more than "one piece of meat." It is less, by 47 calories.

Sliced or diced beef packs badly. Air fills the gaps between the cubes, so a volume measure of solid meat always undershoots the piece it came from. If the choice is between logging a cup and logging a steak, log the steak — and if you have a scale, use it, because 30 g slices at 56 calories apiece are the unit this meat actually gets eaten in.

How does cube steak compare

All five rows are cooked steaks from the same USDA survey release, so this is preparation against preparation rather than one database against another:

Our take: cube steak is the value pick of this list and the numbers say so plainly. At 187 calories per 100 g it sits 9 below tenderloin with 28.8 g of protein against 30.5 — a difference of one bite, at a fraction of the price per pound. If the only goal is the lowest calorie cost per gram of protein, plain round steak wins outright at 166 calories and 29.7 g, and it is the same muscle before the tenderizer touched it. Chuck is the row to skip when you are counting: 254 calories for 4 oz and the least protein of the five, because more than half of its calories come from fat. All of them count toward the MyPlate protein group, so the choice is about calories and cost, not about food groups.

Most popular cube steak brands in the United States

Ranked by how widely each product appears among foods sold in the United States, from the BodyPal food database of over 3.3 million products. Calories are the figures printed on each Nutrition Facts label, checked against USDA FoodData Central.

Brand popularity: BodyPal food database. Nutrition: manufacturer labels / USDA FoodData Central.

Cube steak FAQs

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Count it without the math

Point the camera at the skillet and BodyPal logs the steak, the flour and the sodium in one shot.