A question about a recipe: Texas Proud Beef Fajitas

I have a question about the ingredient "tenderized beef skirt steak" on the recipe "Texas Proud Beef Fajitas" from aargersi. In this recipe, what does tenderized skirt steak refer to? After marinating? Before? Is the meat sliced before marinating?

MrsWheelbarrow
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Texas Proud Beef Fajitas
Recipe question for: Texas Proud Beef Fajitas

3 Comments

MrsWheelbarrow July 13, 2012
Aargersi - thank you so much. I fiddled around with things... learned about enzymatic marinades from Kari Underley (The Art of Beef Cutting) - so used pineapple juice instead of papaya and the recipe was fantastic. Required no mulching.
 
aargersi July 13, 2012
Hey Mrs W - stupid gmail put my notice in my spam folder so I JUST saw it! Chef Ono answered correctly, down here they semi-mulch the steak, I like it because the marinade gets all up in there and it's super tender. You could also use a flank steak and do both sides in a shallow criss-cross cut pattern - works great for fajitas
 
ChefOno July 7, 2012

Most butchers / meat departments have a machine that punches a pattern of holes into a thin cut of meat to tenderize it ("needling"). They usually reserve its use to turn cuts from the round into "cube steak" but they'll run whatever you want through the device at your request.

You can do the same thing at home with a hand-held version ("jaccard"). It probably doesn't matter in this case but the results are certainly more attractive and I think more effective.

The down side with either device is any surface contamination will be pushed through to the center creating similar food safety issues to ground meat.
 
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