Skirt Steak with Garlic Parsley Sauce

I love skirt steak, but there are two problems with skirt steak that most people can attest to. One – that it’s too salty, and two, that it’s too chewy. Well fear not, because the solution to the two problems is easy.

Skirt steak is actually the diaphragm muscle from the cow, and is very corrugated, which means there’s a lot of surface area for all the salt from the koshering process to hide in. So to fix that just soak the skirt steak in regular water for at least 30 minutes.

The problem with soaking is you can’t sear it properly, because the meat can only get as hot as the water, which isn’t hot enough for proper browning temperatures. So it’s crucial to properly dry the meat. Do whatever you can to dry it; pat it dry with paper towels, dredge it in flour, leave it in the fridge over night on a cooling rack, it doesn’t matter, but the drier the meat the better.

Now for the second problem, the meat being too chewy. We’ve all heard, you have to cut meat against the grain right? Well the reason is because each individual muscle fiber, when taken as one unit, is pretty chewy, so we want to cut it in manageable pieces, so we cut the meat against the grain. On some cuts of meat, that can be a little tricky, like with skirt steak.

The grain pretty much runs the width of the skirt steak, so you can’t just cut the skinny side because that will be with the grain. So to cut against the grain, cut the long strip of skirt steak in 1/3s or 1/4s, and then rotate that meat, so now you can cut against the grain.

I then grilled the steak over high heat, and after each side was done I brushed each side with the garlic-parsley sauce, which since it has a lot of sugar in it, shouldn’t be cooked over high heat because it can burn. I let it rest, and sliced against the grain.

I used the steak and made steak wraps with them. I brushed the remaining garlic parsley sauce over a flour tortilla, piled up the sliced steak, topped with pitted kalamata olives, and some Woebers horseradish sauce (love that stuff). However, I can see these topping a salad, or to just serve these along your next BBQ.

Ingredients