2For66

Cook Date: July 17, 2024

I’ve been promising myself I’d make grilled steak tacos for a couple of years. Why have I waited so long? I made this NY Times recipe and was bowled over by their taste. [Note: the first 10 people who use that link can get the recipe without going through their paywall].

The base of the tacos is skirt steak, which I love to grill.

The key to the skirt steak is this simple rub.

Mix it up and rub it into the meat. Place in a pan, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight. Here it is the next day. You don’t have to go overnight with the rub; you can go as short as an hour, but I recommend at least 4 hours. That will allow you to shop in the morning, prepare and apply the rub, and it will be ready by grilling time.

While the steak was resting with its rub I prepped the salsa base by broiling a jalapeño, slices of a white onion and a clove of garlic.

Roughly chop it and place it in a mini-food processor (or a blender will work).

Give it multiple spins until we get a paste

As sometimes often happens with recipes, my finished product looked nothing like the published recipe. Not gonna lie: this looked weird to me; much too paste-like for a salsa; perhaps broiling the onions took out too much moisture. But this is just the base; we’ll add tomatoes and avocado at the end. We’ll see.

Let’s grill some steak! Get the grill ripping hot, scrape clean and rub with a bit of high smoke-point oil – such as grapeseed.

It cooks very quickly; just a couple of minutes per side.

When the outside has some char on it, remove from the heat and let rest a few minutes.

While the steak is resting cube up the avocado, quarter the cherry tomatoes and fold into the salsa paste base.

It definitely looks better now that we’ve added these vegetables. I had a taste and was pleasantly surprised.

Time to cut the meat into bite-sized chunks. You have to be careful to cut against the grain; otherwise you’ll have tacos that are as tough as shoe leather. I cut across the equator (with the grain) to create three smaller pieces of skirt steak. The turn it, cut across the grain and chop a bit.

You may notice the meat is not rare or even medium rare. The steak cooks in a matter of minutes and you need a balance of a nice crust and rare meat. I went for the crust-side of the equation. The steak was well-marbled so was still very juicy.

I also sliced some radishes, crumbled some Cotija cheese, and toasted some corn tortillas. Tacos are a little like stir-frying: you have a lot of individual ingredients to make the dish. Unlike stir-fry the assembly takes place after cooking.

The red salsa was on standby, just in case, and the sautéd corn made up a side dish.

Assemble the tacos and dinner is served.

For all my worry about the salsa it tasted bright and fresh with some heat from the jalapeño and body from the onion. No one reached for the more traditional salsa. Next time though I might add a bit of water to the base to thin it out a bit. On the plus side, the salsa stayed firmly in the tacos without dripping out.

This was excellent. We had Mary Ann over for the experiment and she loved them. I found a carne asada recipe from Serious Eats that I am planning to cook and compare. The marinade for that includes making homemade chili powder and many more ingredients. I hope to cook that by the end of the summer.

By contrast, this recipe yields great results with a super easy rub. If you don’t have time, or desire, to make the salsa; just buy some pre-made. The heart of the meal is that delicious rubbed-and-grilled skirt steak. And remember, you don’t have to let the meat “marinate” with the rub all night; one hour is the minimum anything above that is good too.

Verdict: 4 Stars ★★★★. A delicious dinner for relatively little effort. Give it a try.