Steak

Steak is a food item dropped by cows set alight or obtained by cooking Raw Beef in a furnace. Each Steak restores 4 units to the Food Bar and 12.8 hunger saturation.

Cooking
Alternatively, the player can use a flint and steel to set cows on fire to collect ready-cooked Steak or watch for Steaks dropped in the wake of a forest fire or nearby surface lava pools.

Advantages

 * Given a decent stock of Raw Beef, Steak can be produced as needed using a furnace and sticks in a matter of seconds.
 * Steak restores more food units and saturation than other cooked meats (fish or chicken).
 * In fact, Steak restores more units and saturation than other food items save for Cake, Mushroom Stew, and the Golden Apple - while requiring much less time and resources to create.
 * More Steak can be acquired per cow than Cooked Porkchop acquired per pig, and cows also produce leather.

Disadvantages

 * As with Raw Beef, Steak's availability is dependent on the presence of cows within sight, which can be random at best and require extensive traveling in some cases, depending on the biome the player spawns in.

There's nothing like the rleeif of finding what you're looking for.