These days we have not had the luxury of cooking with luxury ingredients. That setback has actually proved to be instrumental in the refinement of our cooking and in our approach to ingredients.
I am not jumping on the comfort food band wagon. I am just looking at possibilities. It's easier to make great food when you start with top tier ingredients, our challenge now is to find out what we can do with the unrivaled quality of more accessible items. I am looking at, and asking about what is possible on a budget.
These skirt steaks are a prime, no pun planned, example of our use of refinement with often overlooked ingredients. Sure flank and skirt steaks are the quick grilled and fajita loved staples of Saturday afternoons. What if we could use a few simple techniques to change these perceptions.
Growing up I remember steak and eggs at the Georgia Diner on Queens Boulevard. They called it Roumanian steak and eggs and it was only many years later that I learned that Roumanian steak was actually skirt steak. This was one of my favorite breakfast treats because the meat was so tender and flavorful. The hash brown and eggs were more of an afterthought, appreciated but unnecessary. At the time it was a cut that I never encountered anywhere else. Because of this it was a dish that I looked forward to savoring on the weekends when we went out for breakfast.
While we were exploring Korean and Filipino markets the other day we wandered into Ottomanelli & Sons in Woodside. They happened to have beautiful prime skirt steak. In this instance, we have seasoned the skirt steaks with salt, given them a pass with our Jaccard and then dusted them with Activa. After an overnight compression we have double thick skirt steaks which have the marbling of an ideal steak and a uniform consistency for cooking. I believe we have been able to find a means to replicate the taste and texture of a rib eye cap at a much more approachable price. Furthermore, we do not need to find a use for the center cut of the rib eye once we have removed the cap.
Of course, while we have refined the skirt steak and now have a great and relatively inexpensive steak to eat and work with, we still need to find a way to present it. The perfect steak dish still hovers just out of reach and once again we will attempt to capture it.
And as for other seasonings, a bit of flavored brine from bacon to blue cheese could certainly add a distinct level of character to the skirt steak. We'll just have to wait and see what moves us.
