Friday Night Mexican: Flanking Maneuver

So thanks to this blog, the details of our weekly Mexican adventures have become legendary in our local circle of friends and family. The statistics page on Blogspot tells me that we've also received visitors from Germany, the UK, and Singapore. So welcome to all of our new readers! Make sure you subscribe, follow the RSS feed, leave a comment or at the very least, pass us along to a friend.

All of the attention means we can't stay stagnant; we've got to keep upping our game. So we went back to Fiesta at Rick's for this week's Crispy Flank Steak Shreds with Golden Onions and Red Chile Salsa.

This recipe doesn't get photogenic until the very end when of the preparation. Who wants to look at boiling meat? It's really not that interesting. The key to your meat boiling is to do it the night before you want to serve this dish. I get off work early on Fridays and figured that I would have ample time to knock this one out of the park.

My better half suggested that it would take like two hours to shred the flank steak. With everything else that had to be done, I probably didn't want to have to cook the meat as well. I chalked it up to being overly cautious and figured that there was no way it was going to take 2 hours to shred that steak, but I capitulated and we cooked the steak Thursday night. Here it is after spending a night in the fridge.

One hour and forty minutes of shredding later, I was glad that we cooked the steak on Thursday night. I didn't appreciate how fine angel hair pasta is or how utterly difficult it is to achieve that fine a shred without some sort of special tool. We've shredded meat before for pulled pork sandwiches but this recipe calls for shredding on a whole other level. A quick Google search yielded no results for fast and efficient ways to do this but there must be some tool out there. I don't know what this dish goes for at Topolobampo but with the labour that goes in to it, it must cost a fortune.

Toasting the Guajillo peppers. We needed 8 for this recipe and even after what we used this week and last, there are still a few left in the package that we bought. Amazing. After being toasted they went into a nice warm reconstituting bath. It's like a day spa for chile peppers.

Usually all of the onions we use get minced or diced or coarsely chopped, so it was very hard to only "slice" this one. I couldn't resist the urge to chop it in half anyway because I wasn't sure we necessarily wanted onion rings. These get tossed in flour and dropped into some hot oil.

Now here is where we had some problems. A gracious coworker lent us a deep fat thermometer (candy thermometer) as you're supposed to be doing this frying at 190.5 degrees Celsius (375 degrees Fahrenheit). Well, in the heat of battle, or rather, in the heat of the oil, that thermometer decide it wanted to cast off its mortal coil and leave the realm of the working. (Sorry Dave!) I wasn't sure if the glass had cracked and leaked any alcohol or solder into the oil but I decided not to chance it. We then started with new oil and were essentially flying (frying) blind.

The onions were generally no problem because they were relatively dry with their coating of flour. Once we put the meat in there though, we were pretty convinced that the oil was a little too hot. The meat, still retaining a lot of its moisture reacted a little more violently than we had hoped and it became a game of dodge the hot flying oil. After a few iterations we got the temperature of the oil to something that we deemed more acceptable and managed to fry the rest of the meat without incident.

The serving platter with a bed of onions and a bird's nest of deep-fried shredded flank steak. I was initially apprehensive about the amount that it produced. Usually we've created a huge pot of something as the main dish, but this looked positively sparse. As it turns out, a little goes a long way.

After the guajillos finished their spa treatment, they got tossed into a blender with roasted tomatoes, garlic, and some chipotles. The toasting, roasting and smoking of the ingredients really give this salsa a bold punch.

The usual suspects: a large bowl of guacamole, cilantro, limes and a stack of hot off the skillet corn tortillas.

Finally the money shot. Fresh corn tortilla, a layer of the red chile salsa, a dollop of guacamole, onions and flank steak, a sprinkle of cilantro and a hint of lime juice. It tastes as good as it looks. Now, who knows where to get a good candy thermometer in Toronto?

Herb Garden Update

So after last week's deck construction we finally got the plants in the dirt on tuesday night. We've got two trays going to start everything off. Tray one has flat leaf parsley, strawberries, peppers, thyme, curly parsley, and oregano.