Charcoal-Grilled Steak Tacos

today i'm inviting you to come with me on a little tour of the perfect steak taco [Music] all right we're gonna do steak tacos so obviously we gotta talk about the steak i'm gonna be using some skirt steak here but we're gonna talk about that a little bit more a little bit later after we've made the marinade here so marinades in mexico tend to be fairly minimal very light they could be just a salt on it and let it sit for a little while it could be salt with a little bit of lime juice sometimes people will put some garlic in with that lime juice and if you're going to go sort of full bore then you're going to add some other spices and herbs to it that would be oregano a little cumin and black pepper and then what i've seen people doing a lot recently is take that the norse swissa which is like chicken bouillon that's just packed with all kinds of things like msg and put that on it so i'm going to take you through the full bore marinade here but we're going to go a different direction when we get to the north suisa stuff okay let's start with the lime juice here i'm going to do about three tablespoons of lime juice using the mexican lime juicer here so i got one and a half tablespoons with half of a lime there so that will be two of two halves i think will bring us up to exactly where we want to be here and then i'm going to add to that the garlic that we talked about i would normally if i was doing large batch put it into a blender and just blend the garlic into it um but for this point right here i'm going to suggest that you use a microplane grater it's way faster than trying to do a very very fine mince on the garlic so you can just push it through like that when you get to the the end of it though um don't go fast because you can grate your fingertips off into this so right at the very end i just sort of go slowly with it and then we'll put that grated garlic which is quite fine here into the marinade and that will be i guess i'm going to use this small bowl here so i'm just going to tap the microplane there scoop it up in the knife and then put it in there along with the three tablespoons there of the garlic now i'm using whole spices you may have ground black pepper ground cumin but i'm going to grind them fresh because their aroma is so much more vibrant so if you're going to make the best steak taco that you've ever had you're probably going to want to start with everything fresh here so crush that all up until you get an absolute fine powder [Music] okay i think i've got what i need here um i will usually keep next to the molcajete a small brush so i can put those spices or get all of those spaces out of the mortar very easily there and then i'm going to put into it a half a teaspoon of salt and the last thing that i have to go well i got two things to go here one is that i'm going to replace the notion of something that's really jam-packed with umami like the norsuisa with worcestershire sauce what they call salsa inglesa english sauce um in spanish in mexico um and i'm just gonna dump in a couple i have it already measured out into this because um the salsa and glacier that i have here the worcestershire the leon parents the good stuff it's in a gallon jug and so it's a little hard to measure out of so i tend to dump it into something else and then i'm going to eyeball a couple of tablespoons of olive oil here you can use vegetable oil for this either one would be fine for this preparation mix that all together and you've got your marinade made now that brings us to talking about the skirt steak for these really good skirt steak tacos what you need to know first is that there are two kinds of skirt steak there's an inside skirt steak and an outside skirt steak usually you would think that an inside piece would be more protected and more tender but that's not the case with skirt steak it's the outer skirt steak that is the really really tender and beautiful and most beefy tasting of the two so you need to ask the butcher what the butcher has in terms of skirt steak so you'll know how to work with it outside skirt steak you don't have to do anything to inside skirt steak it's thicker and most of the mexican butchers that use it will butterfly it because it's considerably thicker than this piece here which is the outside spirit steak they will butterfly it and then they'll run it through a tenderizing machine a jaccarding machine that's sort of that machine that's got all the little needle-like things that come down and actually tenderize the meat because that inside skirt steak is really tough okay so if you get it you're gonna and you don't have it tenderized or anything you might want to pound it a little bit just to tenderize it yourself before you use it and it's going to cook a lot it take a lot longer to cook than using the um in the outside the insides outside skirt steak even i got confused on that okay so this is uh what i would call more of a topical marinade than a marinade that is going to tenderize the meat so we'll put it on here and leave it sit for an hour now if you leave it set for longer than an hour it's going to take the red out of the meat and that's why i i season this highly as a topical marinade here and then with a pair of tongs i can just turn the whole thing over and and make sure that there is plenty of this marinade all over it flip that guy there and also i've got the last little bit of the marinade i can sprinkle over the top of this one here and this one here but they're nicely covered now salt will begin to cure the meat a little bit acid will give it a bright flavor all those herbs and the spices that go into this i think you'll just love and the brightness of that fresh squeezed lime juice is unbeatable so i'll meet you at the grill in an hour so this is what it's going to look like you can see that the red at the top of this p these pieces of meat has darkened some but if i see a little flap here where it wasn't completely covered with the marinade it's still bright red that's what i want it to look like because i think that everybody wants the steak to be really beautifully pink on the inside and not well not to have that all sucked out by the marinade and ours what we did here i've got the the um the fire here at about what i would call a medium high kind of a fire not medium it's got to be hotter than that because i want to get some real grill marks some sear on this thing i know we put some some oil in this marinade but just to make sure that everything is nicely coated in oil right when i put it in i'm spraying that i love the spr that sprayer there and then lay it down over this medium high spire like that i'm not trying to get all that marinade on there you can mostly just kind of like brush it off i'm going to use the sprayer again to oil the top so that when i flip it over so this is going to take and this is all dependent on your fire and how thick your pieces of meat are but someplace around three to four minutes aside now i am a firm believer in medium-rare steak but not medium rare skirt steak i like skirt steak to be cooked a little bit more because it's more tender so a kind of medium is what i'm looking for for skirt steak and because it's such a thin piece of meat you kind of have to go with your intuition on this it's not going to necessarily take the touch uh test that i have shown you many times it's not going to take that test very well because the piece is so so thin here now as with all grilling you want to leave the piece of meat alone in the place that you set it down until you get that really good grill marks underneath then you can start to pry it away hopefully it will come away really easily and especially if you have well seasoned grill grates the little chrome grill grates are almost impossible to season so if you have those on your grill you might think well find out if you can get something like a cast iron grill grate to go in there or even i have sometimes put cast iron grill grates on top of the little chrome ones because you can you can really season cast iron grill grates well and they hold so much heat that you will get a really nice uh nice sear on them okay so i'm seeing that this one even though it had that garlic in there which tends to stick to the grill is um quite free from the the grill i i seasoned these a lot because this is one of my primary grilling areas here but so you can see now how that looks just gorgeous and and well seared look at that one so we're going to cook that for another three minutes i'm gonna guess this piece is a little thicker than this piece so i'll take that piece off first and i think in about three minutes this is going to be good i'm going to put it onto a rack so that i can let it just rest and reabsorb the juices and and not lose so much of its juices onto the cutting board um when these are ready i'm going to put them on here and then i'll meet you back at the cutting board now while that delicious smelling meat is resting i'm going to mash some avocado here i often talk about my sort of fantasy steak taco and it is a little dab of guacamole as they would call it in mexico but it's really just mashed seasoned avocado plus some pico de gallo on the top of it so i have pico de gallo here i'm not going to go into that today because i've covered that in other in other videos here i'm just going to scoop out this this avocado from the flesh i mean the flesh from the the skin and then i'm going to season it with just the two things that it really lacks it really needs salt and it really needs lime there's a little dark spot in one of these and so right up at the top here so i'm just going to leave that in there and scoop around it like that use the like old-fashioned potato masher to go through this five six seven times um i want it to be coarse um because i like the texture of avocado i don't want it to go all the way to say like a smooth puree put some salt in it now it might surprise you in the recipe that accompanies this video i'm going to tell you it's going to take a scant teaspoon of salt and you're going to go no it doesn't but if you don't season the avocado that much it's going to drag the whole thing down so you have to make sure that it's really well seasoned i'm going to give it about a tablespoon of lime here not quite the whole half of that i just want to perk up the flavor but i really want this to be the essence of avocado flavor i'm going to give it a taste and see where our seasonings are yeah i think i i hit it right because this is a condiment so it should come off just a little bit salty like all condiments do now let's talk about cutting up skirt steak because skirt steak has to be cut across the grain so with our thicker piece here we will start you'll cut it into about three inch segments like that and then you will cut cross grain so turn it 90 degrees and cut across in about quarter inch strips now if you cut it with the grain if i don't turn it the 90 degrees like that if i cut it with the grain then it's going to feel very tough when you're eating it but cutting across the grain it'll be very nice and tender okay so we've got see how pretty that is that's the medium that i was talking about that's what i like this as the thickest part of it it's sort of medium to medium rare and when you get to the thinner piece it'll be just a little bit more on the medium side okay so say there's our meat first of all doesn't that just look delicious now this is a place that you could use a finishing salt don't worry if you don't have a finishing salt you could just use a little bit of salt that you would normally use in the kitchen but if you have one of those sort of nice finishing salts that's in bigger flakes this is a good place to use it let me just scrape this stuff over here into this bowl and then i will build for you my fantasy perfect steak taco okay there's that i've got another spoon for the pico de gallo over here i am going to lay a fresh made corn tortilla that's it's got to have that i mean it's got to be you got to have a good tortilla for this and for those of you that have access to good flour tortillas or like to make them yourself this is a dish that is always associated with northern mexico so yes you could use flour tortillas for this but i'm using corn tortillas because that's what i like i'm going to sprinkle a little of this this is malden salt that has that really beautiful flake so i'm going to sprinkle a little bit of that over it just like you would any kind of of steak and then i'm going to put some of these beautiful pieces of skirt steak onto the tortilla then a little dollop of our seasoned mashed avocado and then a spoonful of classic you can see i just go really classic for this but classic pico de gallo salsa mexicana and that really is it except that now it's really it

Channel: Rick Bayless

Views: 68,967

Rating: 4.9429703 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: cOrS2O6m900

Length: 16min 42sec (1002 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 01 2021