Skirt Steak Salad

More often than not, we decide what to make based on what we see at the market and what ends up in our shopping bags.  That is especially true of salads, which we compose in response to what we buy rather than searching for ingredients from a recipe.  Recently we made a main dish salad organized around the beautiful Italian salad mix from Fiddler’s Green, to which we added julienned red cabbage (from Guevara), carrots (from Capay Fruits and Vegetables), and red onions (from Cadena Farm) to boost the already intense color, texture, and flavor; the miraculous winter tomatoes Towani Organic Farm is still bringing to the market; Nicasio Valley Foggy Morning cheese; and marinated and grilled skirt steak from Yolo Land and Cattle.  This is, then, a market salad start to finish, except for a few olives from the Co-op.  

Serving the steak on top of a salad updates how it was served in one of our childhood homes, where a little very flavorful steak went a long way when served over rice.   Skirt steak from Yolo Land and Cattle comes in reasonably small packages—about one pound.  One package can serve 4 people when served this way.  Even marinated, skirt steak is quite chewy, which is its charm.  But skirt steak is MUCH better if you marinate it for 12 to 24 hours.  You need the acidic marinade to tenderize the meat. 

We got the idea for the marinade and dressing for this salad from Roger Hayot’s Dinner at the Authentic Café, the cookbook from a restaurant we loved in Los Angeles, years ago.  This is a great cookbook undermined by a terrible design: the ingredient lists are presented in a pale lime green, making them almost illegible.  Yet this cookbook has survived our frequent purges of our collection because, despite the bad choices of some anonymous book-designer, this one is filled with absolutely terrific recipes of all kinds. (Hayot's title is an ironic one, since his cooking is eclectic in the extreme.)

The original marinade recipe is this.  We confess that we sometimes randomly throw something like these ingredients right into a container with the skirt steak rather than carefully making the marinade first.  But we try to hold you to a higher standard. 

Marinade:

In a blender, whir together:

2 tablespoons heavy soy sauce

2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

2 tablespoons champagne vinegar

1 clove of garlic (peeled and roughly chopped)

1 small chile, (seeded and roughly chopped) or a generous slug of Siracha sauce

1 tablespoon cilantro leaves

1 teaspoon agave or honey

Ground pepper

1/3 cup mild oil

Submerge the steak in the marinade and refrigerate at least overnight.  This is something you can prep on the weekend to eat later in the week.   You can bring home your steak from the market, marinate it after it thaws, and then leave it in the marinade for a few days until you’re ready to cook it.  Whenever you’re poking around in the refrigerator, turn the steak so that all sides are permeated with the marinade.

When it comes time to cook the meat, we cook it in a cast iron skillet over high heat.  It is also possible to cook it on the grill or under the broiler.  Whatever you do, crank up the highest heat you can.  Skirt steak always cooks very fast—let’s say 3-4 minutes a side.  But grassfed beef like that from the market is lower fat and it cooks even faster.  So you might want to turn it after just 2 minutes and check it after 2 minutes on the second side.

Let the steak rest for a while (10 minutes?) before cutting it against the grain in thin slices.

Place the still warm slices over the salad, and then sprinkle a little of the Nicasio Valley cheese over the top.

Here’s the dressing.  Again, in a blender whir together:

½ cup balsamic vinegar

2 medium shallots, roughly chopped

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

freshly ground pepper

¼ teaspoon salt

After this is processed smooth, add, in a steady stream:

¾ cup olive oil.

The result is a thick, nicely emulsified dressing.
 

While we are talking about salads, we want to show another that emerged from a random shop rather than a recipe.  Here we combined Asian pear and persimmon (from Rifat Ahmad), pomegranate (we think this one is from Ramon Cadena), the red walnuts Siegfried dates has been selling, Good Humus salad mix, and a little of that same Foggy Morning cheese.  We dressed this with some Glashoff toasted walnut oil and a little Meyer lemon juice, salt, and pepper.  Again, this salad requires a stroll through the market rather than a recipe.  But its combination of colors, textures, and flavors really could not be bettered by elaborate preparation, slavish conformity to a recipe, or ambitious foraging.  It’s all right here.  And it’s wonderful.