Ingredients: Outside Skirt Steak, Salt, Black Pepper, Olive Oil, Garlic Cloves · 45 min cook time · 450kcal · ~₩41,000
Ingredients
500g Outside Skirt Steak, 1pinch Salt, 1pinch Black Pepper, 1tbsp Olive Oil, 2cloves Garlic Cloves, 0.5bunch Fresh Parsley, 0.5bunch Fresh Cilantro, 0.5tsp Red Chili Flakes, 1splash Red Wine Vinegar, 500g Short Ribs (English Cut), 400g Hanger Steak, 2tbsp Butter, 2medium Shallots, 0.5cup Red Wine, 2cubes Demi-Glace (ice cubes)
Instructions
1. Cut the outside skirt steak into shorter pieces, as wide as your pan. This allows you to divide the meat into pieces of like thickness, so each segment can be cooked for exactly the time it needs.
2. Season the skirt steak with salt, pepper, and a little olive oil. Go easy on the salt because it's extremely thin meat, and go easy on the oil because it's already fatty.
3. Heat a cast iron pan to quite hot. Place the thicker, longer cooking pieces in first and along the edge of the pan where it's a lot less hot. Put the thin piece right in the super hot center. Flip every 30 seconds until a golden crust gradually builds. Pull the thin piece out when pink juice starts pushing out. Remember carryover cooking, so pull the meat when it's still quite raw on the inside.
4. Let the skirt steak rest for a few minutes, then cut them all in half with the grain. Then slice them very thin against the grain. The resulting shorter slices will be perfect bite-sized pieces.
5. To make chimichurri, peel a couple of garlic cloves (not too many because the garlic is going to be raw, and raw garlic is orders of magnitude stronger than cooked garlic). Chop the garlic and a big pile of fresh herbs (parsley and cilantro) as fine as you can get it. Add red chili flakes, a pinch of salt, a little pepper, and just enough nice olive oil to turn this into a sauce. Add a touch of red wine vinegar or lime juice.
6. Spoon a little chimichurri over your steak. It's very strong stuff, but very nice.
7. For short ribs, look at the bone. It'll usually be a little bit off-center. Start cutting on the side of the bone that is closer to the edge. Cut down along the bone as close to the bone as you can get, then stop before you go all the way through. Open up the meat like a book. The flap of meat that was thicker on this side of the bone makes a better hinge to open this up. Cut this thicker side of the book into half its current thickness, again stopping right before you go all the way through, then opening it up. Make a few more shallow slices to make it lay as flat as possible.
8. Season the short rib steak with salt, pepper, and olive oil. Since it's a nice thick steak, it counter-intuitively needs less heat. Cook on medium heat.
9. Flip the short rib steak every 30 seconds. After the first flip, apply a culinary brick (a brick wrapped in aluminum foil for hygiene). This helps you get even contact and thorough crust formation along the entire area of the meat. The brick isn't necessary, but a butterflied cut like this might not really lay flat against the pan surface. It'll sort of tent up around the hinges. The brick helps you get even contact and thorough crust formation along the entire area of the meat.
10. Cook the short rib steak to medium to give all that fat in there more of a chance to melt. Look for lots of pink juice pushing up and pooling on the meat. Let it rest, then slice it thin. It's tender, but not super tender, so thin slicing helps. Try to slice it against the grain, but the butterflying tends to give you a steak where the grain is running in multiple crazy directions, so just do the best you can. Add a little finishing salt, maybe smoked sea salt.
11. For hanger steak, trim off the silver skin. This is the rubber band-like connective tissue. You can clearly see and feel how it's different from fat. It will not melt during cooking, so it's got to come off. Use a thin knife to slip under the silver skin and shave it off, removing as little of the meat as possible. It often helps to get a strip of silver skin started and then pull up on it, then shave through the rest.
12. Separate the two sides of the hanger steak by slowly unzipping the meat along the seam of that connective tissue. Cut right along the white part until you've got the halves separated. The bigger piece is now totally clean. Peel the connective tissue from the smaller half.
13. Cut the smaller half of the hanger steak in half again and pan roast them like loins. Cut the bigger half into four thin steaks. First, cut off the part that hangs off to the side. Cut it to half its original thickness and stop right before you go all the way through. Open it up. Then cut the rest of the bigger half into three pieces of roughly equal mass, bearing in mind the middle part there is much thicker. Again, slide the knife in there and cut it to half its thickness, open it up, and give it a few shallow cuts to get it to lay nice and flat.
14. Season the hanger steak with salt, pepper, and oil. Cook on medium-low heat. Roll them around frequently until you've got a decent crust built up on the outside. Then start butter basting. You can do that with a spoon, but it works just as well to simply keep flipping the meat around in the butter. This creates something like a roasting environment in the pan, omnidirectional heat that'll help you cook something thicker like this through.
15. Since this is like a little roast more than a steak, you might use a thermometer to judge doneness, but you can also just poke and peek. If you're going to do that, scissors are great. Snipping it is way easier than trying to saw through something with a knife while it's still in the pan. Pull the meat out when you see a lot of pink juice pushing out of the side. Let it rest a little bit.
16. For the pan sauce, sauté some shallots (chopped nice and fine) in the pan. When they are brown and soft, deglaze with a little red wine. Use a wooden spoon to scrape the pan without chipping your seasoning layer. If you don't want to use wine, use water followed by a big splash of balsamic vinegar. If your sauce starts to look over-reduced, add water instead of more wine. Too much reduced red wine can get pretty bitter. Turn off the heat, and when the bubbling has all but stopped, stir in some butter. If you didn't have demi-glace, you'd probably compensate by using twice this much butter. You mix the butter into a sauce off the boil, and a thick, luscious emulsion will form. If the sauce is really boiling, the butter will just separate into water with oil on top.
17. Carve the little mock tenderloins into thin medallions. Pour the juices from your board into the sauce. Tear some parsley into this at the last second. There's enough heat in there to wilt it down, but without turning it brown. Spoon the sauce right over the steak.