Cube steak is a cut of beef, usually top roun or top sirloin, tenderized by fierce pounding of a meat mallet or use of an electric tenderizer. Many professional cooks insist that regular tenderizing mallets cause too much mashing to produce a proper cube steak, and insist on either using specialized cube steak machines, or manually applying a set of sharp pointed rods to pierce the meat in every direction. This is the most common cut of meat used for chicken fried steak. In some parts of the United States, cube steak may be called a "minute steak".