Summer of Meat: Carne Asada

In an effort to bridge his love of the grill with his love of excruciating minutiae, the writer has begun an occasional series on his summer grilling. With pictures!

I decided to start the Summer of Meat with Carne Asada tacos. They require a ridiculously low amount of effort, but they're mouthwatering. Low cost, high payoff? Sounds perfect for me.



First the meat. I bought a couple pacakges of carne asada cut steaks. This is sort of new for me; I normally make this with flank or skirt steak.

The marinade is a mixture of an off-the-shelf fajita sauce (which I found to be too sweet by itself), equal parts lime juice and soy sauce, several shakes of garlic Tabasco, and a couple teaspoons of cumin. It came out to about one part of fajita marinade to one part rest-of-the-junk-combined.

I let the meat soak overnight, then fired up the grill.



This stuff is paper thin, so at medium heat it cooks in the blink of an eye. I gave it about a minute per side.

When they were done, I threw some corn tortillas on the grill to crisp them up a little.



You got yer frijoles, chopped up steak, sour cream and Cholula. It's taco time!

For dessert I made grilled peaches.



Slice a couple ripe peaches in half, scoop out the pit, and dust the flat sides with sugar. Then throw it face down on a hot grill for 5 minutes or so.

RESULTS: The steak was exceedingly tasty, but the cut's pretty chewy. Next time I'll stick to skirt or flank.

The peaches were the BOMB. The sugar caramelizes on the grill, and the whole thing is like a warm peach pie without the crust. Like pie, it could have used some vanilla ice cream or some fresh whipped cream, but still, fantastic and easy.

NEXT TIME ON SUMMER OF MEAT: Grilled chicken tikka masala.