How to Make Smoked Fish Tacos and Grilled Steak Fajitas

today on cook's country brian makes bridget a california favorite smoked fish tacos adam reviews chimney starters and christie makes julia a streamlined recipe for grilled steak fajitas that's all right here on cook's country in the late 90s jim rodel started smoking seafood in his backyard and turned it into a sideline business now one of his neighbors called the cops on gym a lot and they even claimed that jem and his wife kathleen were doing witchcraft then in 2001 on the advice of an inspector jim moved his business to a beachfront spot in cayucos california right on highway one they make a lot of different things at rudel's but it's the tacos filled with shredded glazed salmon it's all put rudel smokehouse on the map and luckily our own brian roof was able to spend some time at rudel's before jim passed away in 2018 and learned all about these incredible smoked salmon tacos we're gonna head into the kitchen jim this one's for you now these tacos are not like california baja style tacos those are usually made with white fish like grouper or mahi mahi but brian's here he's going to show us how to make these fabulous salmon tacos that's right i was fortunate enough to spend a few hours with jim rudel in his kitchen before he passed away last year and he walked me through the ins and outs of smoking salmon smoking all kinds of fish and he showed me how to make a perfect smoked salmon taco so why don't we begin with the star of the show and that's the salmon okay okay this is a two pound center cut salmon fillet and you want to get a center cut fillet because it's more even in size if you get something closer to the tail it tends to taper off right and we prefer to cut our own fillets out of a whole two pound piece because they're going to be more even and consistent so they'll cook more consistently on the grill sounds good so we'll just begin by trimming any excess fat from the top edge here and we'll just square up the bottom portion a little bit okay and then we can split it directly in half and each half will go in half so now the fish is cut up we're going to make a cure for it and the cure is going to do several things for us on the grill one is going to flavor the fish obviously two it's going to give us a nice mahogany color on the grill and three it's going to improve the texture make it a little bit more meaty by drawing some of the moisture out of the fish so this is a very simple cure it's brown sugar i have one cup of light brown sugar to that we're going to add a quarter cup of kosher salt and one tablespoon of granulated garlic i'm just going to whisk this together okay and the most efficient way to keep the cure in contact with the fish is by putting into a ziploc bag all right so if you don't mind holding this bag i'm going to first take each fillet and run it through the cure to make sure all sides are coated this is the worst halloween ever this is the best candy you're ever going to get that's true yeah exactly okay all right and now i will just dump the rest of this cure right into there okay good because i was like there's a lot left in that bowl it's a significant amount of cure but you really want to have this much to make sure the fish gets evenly cured so we can press all the air out of that bag okay and we want to cure this for at least four hours but if we have the opportunity we can go for a full 24 hours and it's even better we'll just sew this in the refrigerator okay okay bridgette so the fish has been curing for about 24 hours okay so we're going to work on the vegetable garnish and then the sauce both were created by jim rudell's wife so this is a combination of celery grated carrot and diced granny smith apple this is different yeah okay so that's one rib of celery we're going to add to that one granny smith apple into the bowl with the celery and now the final touch a grated carrot stir the salad together and it's all set and ready for tacos so again a slightly unusual garnish for tacos this is a mayonnaise-based sauce and the secret ingredient here is spicy brown mustard so i have a half a cup of mayonnaise and to that we're going to add a quarter cup of spicy brown mustard two teaspoons of lemon juice and one quarter teaspoon of ground cumin so we'll just whisk this together to combine now we can turn our attention to making a wood chip packet to go on the grill so we could smoke the fish okay i have a cup of pre-soaked apple wood chips i've soaked them in water for about 15 minutes and you can use any type of wood chip that you like we prefer fruit woods like apple because they're a little bit less intense than say something like hickory which you tend to find all over the place very readily gotcha so we want to make an eight and a half by four inch wood chip packet okay so if you want to hand me my knife there i'm just going to poke two two inch slits right in this foil to give the wood chips and the smoke an outlet all right so the woodchip packet is set now this fish has been curing and you can see that a lot of the moisture has come out of the fish and all that salt and sugar has essentially created a brine so we flipped this over once halfway through the curing process just to make sure the fish cured evenly we're going to rinse this off because we don't want to cook any of those sugar chunks onto the fish so i'm just going to go back here and rinse them off you want to pat the fish dry we are now ready to head out to the grill and smoke this fish let's go all right okay bridget we're going to cook the salmon with relatively low heat between 250 and 275 degrees so i have a very small amount of charcoal here i have about two quarts of charcoal briquettes and i'm just going to pour them evenly over half of the grill and just reorganize them with my grill brush get them all over to one side right and then we can put the wood chip packet on top of the coals okay then we'll put our cooking grate in place we'll cover the grill and let that go for about five minutes until the wood chips begin to smoke okay sounds good okay bridges it's been about five minutes and the wood chips are just beginning to smoke okay so we'll clean and oil the cooking grate good idea to do every time yes set up your grill and fish probably more than any other protein has a tendency to stick yes so now at smoke house there in cayucos california they brush an apricot based glaze on the fish towards the end of cooking but they also smoked the fish for about four hours we're smoking the fish for about 30 minutes so we found it best to go ahead and apply this glaze right at the beginning of the cooking yeah because you don't want to be taking the lid on and off exactly okay so this is just two tablespoons of apricot preserves mixed with one tablespoon of water and we just microwaved it for about 30 seconds to loosen it up a bit okay we're going to brush that all over the fillets okay so that's all brushed now we can place the fillets on the grill and i'm going to position with the thick end of the fillets a little bit closer to the fire because they can really absorb some more of that heat cover that and position the lid vent directly over the salmon okay we'll let that go until it hits 135 degrees and that takes about 30 minutes or so sounds good all right bridgette it's been about 30 minutes beautiful so we want to temp the fillet in the thickest part to make sure it's 135 degrees nice all right so now we can just transfer the fillets to a plate okay you want to temp that loosely with some foil sure great we're gonna take these inside and let them rest for about five minutes okay okay bridget so the salmon's been sitting for five minutes so it's a little bit cooler to handle and we're ready to flake it so i'm going to take each fillet and the skin just comes off very easily so we're just going to flake it coarsely with the back of a fork you could use your fingers if you wanted to and then even though we cured this with a fair amount of salt we're just going to season it a little bit to taste with a little kosher salt here okay so the fish is flaked and then we're ready to assemble our tacos we have some warmed up flour tortillas so we're going to hit it first with the sauce so our little chopped salad sticks to it very well and then we'll hit it with the salmon okay and then the final touch on the two cents of california a little bit of salad just a few leaves of mescaline mix can i have your plate sure we'll hand you a taco thank you that is picture-worthy you turned salmon into bacon of the sea that is amazing it's juicy it's sweet it's salty i love the crunch of the vegetables too very nice that's me saying that the granny smith apple is nice and tart that's my favorite part of the salad jim riddell is a smart man i think it was the husband wife team his wife is a smart lady well if you want to make our version of jim rodell's famous salmon tacos it starts with samothlei's coat salmon fillets with brown sugar and salt and refrigerate overnight meanwhile create a quick salad with apple celery and carrot and a spiced mayo sauce heat a packet of wood chips on the grill until smoking brush the salmon with an apricot glaze then cook covered until medium well shred the salmon and make the tacos with mascalan the mayonnaise sauce and the apple salad so from cook's country a california original smoked fish tacos you're going to want to make this he turned salmon into bacon [Music] when lighting a charcoal grill you never want to use lighter fluid because it imparts this nasty chemical flavor to the food instead you want to use a charcoal starter and today adam's going to tell us which one is best julia we have six different models here the price range was 14.99 to 29.95 so pretty inexpensive yeah and you can see they're all basically the same design it's a chamber that's separated by a little divider into a smaller bottom portion a larger top portion you put a couple of sheets of crumpled paper right in the bottom put it down into the grill load up the top chamber with charcoal light the paper it lights the charcoal and like you know 20 30 minutes later bob's your uncle you have a bunch of glowing hot embers you're ready to pour them out into the grill and get grilling yep so to test these our testers used each one with three different quantities of charcoal three quarts six quarts and seven quarts and they built the two types of fires that the test kitchen relies on the most it's just a straight up single level hot fire or a dual zone cooler fire a fire with a hot zone and a cool zone for things like chicken poultry or a low and slow project like pulled pork the capacity of the top chamber was also an important design factor in our lineup it ranged from five to seven quarts and you can see i have these two bowls of charcoal here this one's five quarts this one's seven quarts the problem with the smaller capacity and the smaller amount of charcoal is that sometimes your fire may not get hot enough so you won't get that sear that you're after or it could die out before you're done cooking the food then you have to go in there and put more charcoal in it's kind of a nuisance so testers absolutely preferred the larger ones one at the end this one these are six and seven quarts top capacity now you can see that most of these are cylindrical one of them is not like the other and testers really learned why when they started pouring charcoal out into the grill because this curved edge helps direct the charcoal down into a pretty accurate flow so you can place it easily that one in front of you the square one oh yeah it'd almost be like a waterfall of charcoal things kind of go everywhere exactly it was a lot harder for them to pour accurately now when you are gonna pick up a container full of glowing hot sparkling coals the handle is very important you can see these two right in front of you oh oh that's not substantial at all little thin wooden handles and that's exactly what the testers thought they just felt insubstantial they much preferred bigger beefier grippier handles like this and this doohickey here is a helper handle so you hold this with one hand obviously with a grilled glove on this with the other and it sort of supports the whole chimney and helps you pour with more accuracy this is actually the winning chimney starter this is the weber rapid fire chimney starter it's 14.99 so it's one of the least expensive ones here and it's great it has a six quart capacity it has a big beefy handle and a helper handle and it's everything we could possibly want from a chimney starter so there you have it our winning chimney starter is the weber rapid fire chimney starter at just 14.99 beef fajitas are a tex-mex staple but there are a lot of bad versions out there so today christy is going to show us how to make them the right way there are so many bad versions i've eaten them but when you're making them at home you want good ones and the key to that is having a really great flavorful balanced marinade you need a plan you need a plan we got a plan all right well we're going to start out with the beef first so skirt steak is great this is two pounds it's a long cut cooks very quickly on the grill but this is way too unwieldy for us to put on the grill as is so first of all i just want to trim a little bit now this is well marbled and you're going to have a lot of fat so you don't want to go crazy but if you have big pockets or if you have a lot of silver skin you can kind of trim that away so i'm just going to cut each of the pieces into three equal segments and then we'll come back and work on the marinade okay we actually went to this great restaurant in houston texas called ninfas and had great fajitas there and it's like the home of fajitas right right they're fantastic and we wanted a marinade that was similar to theirs our marinades usually start with soy sauce and we found out that theirs does too and that makes a lot of sense because soy sauce is full of umami and it will season the meat really well so that's where we're starting so i have a quarter cup of soy sauce and that sodium helps the meat hold on to moisture as it cooks we like a juicy steak right also i have three minced garlic cloves here big bold flavors to start then half a cup of vegetable oil now this is really potent and heavy so we wanted something to lighten it up and we tried the usual suspects some lemon juice some lime juice but what we really liked was pineapple juice because in addition to the acidity we also got some nice sweetness yeah so we're hitting all of the great flavors so this is three quarters of a cup or six ounces which is what you'd get in one of those little cans so we'll just mix this together so now i'm going to reserve about a quarter cup and we'll use this a little bit later and then the rest we'll put into our handy dandy gallon size zipper lock the bag for you oh thank you i love this teamwork and now we can add our steaks to the bag i'll just try to press out as much air as i can so we're going to put this in the refrigerator and let it marinate now we want to go at least two hours or up to 24 and the window's important because less than two it's not really going to do much right over 24 the meat could start to get a little bit mushy because of the acidity all right i'm going to put this in the fridge and we'll come back so the steak's been marinating for a few hours now we can focus on the vegetables i have three bell peppers we're gonna leave them in large pieces to start okay so i'm just going to use my paring knife and cut out the stem and now we have the red onion i'm just going to cut this into half inch slices okay this is one of my favorite tricks of all time and it's so easy all right bring it i got toothpicks here yeah you're gonna toothpick the onions we're gonna toothpick the onions yes you don't really need to go through the whole thing as long as you go through half to the center this will hold all the pieces together so much easier than a skewer isn't it great now i have a tablespoon of vegetable oil and i'm just going to brush them on both sides and don't forget the peppers i'm going to brush these two and now i'll season these with a little bit of salt and pepper we'll have a chance to season these later too so if they're not totally done here vegetables done follow me all right the container for vegeta is a tortilla we're using flour they're nice and flexible already and we want to keep them flexible but we want to warm them up so i have 12 flour tortillas and we're going to use the grill like an oven we'll wrap them in some aluminum foil to keep them nice and warm and tender all right and the foil will also trap in the moisture so they won't dry out yes so that's ready now we can move on to the beef these smell great but they are dripping with marinade so we're just going to pat this dry because the marinade has done its job patting it dry and removing it at this point is not going to mean less flavor it's going to mean fewer flare-ups so the steaks are dry but we have one more thing to do before we go outside all right we're just going to put a little bit of salt and pepper on the outside so this is three quarters of a teaspoon of salt and then we'll do a half teaspoon of pepper all right so steak's done vegetables are done tortillas are after we good to go well i want to clean up a little bit and then we'll go outside sounds good all right julia the grill is nice and hot i can feel it from here i turned all the burners to high and let it heat up for 15 minutes with the grill closed then i left the primary burner on high and turned the other burners down to low so it's a two level grill with a hot side and a cool side that's right but now it's time to clean now we're going to oil it so now we can put the vegetables on so the peppers and the onions are going to go over the hot side last but not least we have our tortillas all wrapped up and ready to get warm so these are going to go over the cooler side okay you just want to warm these up so i'm just going to close the lid and let these grill we want to get some nice brown char marks on the vegetables they'll take about 8 to 13 minutes to get to that point the tortillas need maybe about 10 minutes to heat up but i'm gonna come back flip the tortillas after about five and check my vegetables okay so it's been about five minutes time to flip we're just gonna give this about five more minutes all right the vegetables should be done now you're ready here to see perfection so good so we can take the tortillas off all right they should be nice and warm now so we're just going to set these in this disposable pan now before i put the steaks on i'm going to close the grill we're going to let the grates heat up again because we want those to be really really nice and hot when we put the steaks on so in the meantime we want to keep the vegetables nice and warm so i'm going to cover them with some foil all right it's been five minutes the grill should be nice and hot ready for this ready all right let me get it for you so we're putting those over the hot side of the grill these are really really thin steaks so it's hard to get good browning on them before they overcook now in the meantime we've got these vegetables they're nice and brown but they could get a little softer so we're gonna let them finish cooking on the cool side ah so we're just gonna let these go two to four minutes then we'll flip them it's been a couple minutes moment of truth i want to see it [Music] you sure do oh gorgeous yes and now you wouldn't have gotten those grill marks if you hadn't let that grill heat up for another five minutes right needs to be really nice and hot we're good to go we're gonna go another two to four minutes and we're looking for a temperature between 135 and 140 degrees okay okay we need to catch these at the right temp so let's check them out oh they look beautiful they really do it doesn't take very long like i said just two to four minutes we're going to temp these and what we're looking for is between 135 and 140 nailed it so we're not ready yet first we have to tent the steaks with foil while they rest ready to go in so all of our hard work is about to pay off that looks amazing now it's time to slice all right the most important thing to do here is to make sure that we're cutting the steak in thin slices across the grain that does not look too bad does it looks amazing all right on to the vegetables onto the vegetables the big reveal not bad not the hat so now you're just cutting them down to nice thin strips that sort of match the size of the steak pieces you cut right so now these toothpicks have done their jobs so now i'm just separating the onions no need to chop them nope now we've got all sorts of great flavor in here but remember we saved that marinade from the beginning we have the cooked marinade on the steak and we'll marry that flavor with the bright fresh flavors the marinade on the vegetables and i have a tablespoon of chopped fresh cilantro we'll just give this a little toss goodness that looks good so then we'll just add this to our platter let's just dress this up oh i was hoping you were gonna do that yes there we go i think we're ready okay so we have the steak and the vegetables of course but we also have the toppings we have some avocado some sour cream some lime wedges just for a nice burst of acidity and some fresh pico de gallo now if you want to find a recipe for pico de gallo you can find on our website at cookscountry.com we have warm tortillas and i'm going to top it with a little bit of pico de gallo just a little bit of sour cream a couple creamy bits of avocado a squirt of lime do you fold up the end i'm not sure if it's right but it just seems to be i don't think they're good engineering so i think yeah right just for the juices so they don't get on your shirt just like fold mm-hmm that's a good fajita the steak is tender there's no tug i can taste the beef a little bit of soy sauce just adds to the overall beefy flavor vegetables are perfection and it really does feel really cohesive reserving some of the marinade for the vegetables so it's nice and bright that's really important to really add a good flavor there too at the end very balanced great job christy thank you thank you so to make these killer beef fajitas start with two pounds of skirt steak cut the steak into smaller pieces and marinate in a mixture of pineapple juice soy sauce and vegetable oil after prepping a few bell peppers an onion and some tortillas set up the grill by leaving one of the grill burners on high and turning the other burners to low cook the vegetables and tortillas first then set them aside while cooking the steak finally slice everything into strips and toss with some of the reserved marinade from cook's country the ultimate recipe for grilled stick fajitas i put it down picking it back up is always the dicey part oh i did it thanks for watching cook's country from america's test kitchen so what'd you think leave a comment and let us know which recipes you're excited to make or just say hi now you can find links to today's recipes and reviews in the video description and don't forget to subscribe to our channel see you later alligator

Channel: America's Test Kitchen

Views: 87,876

Rating: 4.9530945 out of 5

Keywords: tacos, fajitas, americas test kitchen, cooks country, smoked fish, steak, beef, how to, recipes, cooking show

Id: qwHyG8ajlas

Length: 23min 48sec (1428 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 23 2020