Over the years I’ve made plenty of steaks, but I don’t have a lot of experience cooking flank steaks. Jamie grew up eating carne asada–but on the East Coast, we were eating Steak-Ums sandwiches. Not quite the same, but it got the job done. 8-29: Marinated Flank Steaks was a fun opportunity to cook this recipe and get familiar with cooking a different cut of beef that I’m used to.
I have some experience with marinades so this dish wasn’t too difficult for me to attempt. It is ranked Fairly Easy after all.
This recipe has a lot of ingredients for the marinade and yet surprisingly, we had most of them in our pantry already.
To cook this recipe, I only had to buy the mushrooms, carrots, and the flank steak. As the card says, the cost of this recipe was “Fairly Inexpensive”. Flank steak is a tough cut of meat and marinading it will make the meat tender and more pleasurable to eat.
There was a small amount of fatty connective tissue to trim off. Then I scored some horizontal parallel lines and a crosshatch pattern on top so the marinade would go deeper into the fibers of the muscle tissue. I maybe went a little overboard, but it all worked out.
Chop, chop, chop. It didn’t take long for me to chop the carrots, celery root and onion. I’ll have to slice some mushrooms later on.
It’s time to mix the marinade. I mixed the wine, the mise en place, thyme, juniper berries, allspice, and finally some garlic.
The meat fit perfectly in the half hotel pan. I buried the flank steak in the marinade and left the meat to marinade for 2 hours.
The meat has changed color after 4 hours of sitting in the marinade. It’s taken on the smell of the wine and it’s ready to go in the oven.
I took the meat out of the oven and basted it with the reserved marinade. I this flipped this flank steak put it back under the broiler.
At this point, I saw the meat was cooking, but not getting a good crust. I adjusted the rack up a little higher and let the meat go a little longer. While the meat was cooking, I mixed together the sauce.
Tawny Port isn’t a great substitute for red wine, but the dish still came out alright in spite of that. I mixed the beef broth up and got the cornstarch slurry ready. Now it’s time to chop the mushrooms.
With only a little bit of deft knife work, the mushrooms are dispatched with ease. I also pulled out the butter for the sauce.
Combining the sauce ingredients, I had to keep stirring the cornstarch so the sauce would thicken evenly.
It got a little crispy, but the meat eventually got some darker crust sections, which usually have the most flavor. The sugar from the marinade caramelized on the pan below and it was a pain to clean off later. The meat needed to rest so I finished preparing the mushrooms for the sauce.
I sautéed the mushrooms in some butter until they got dark and delicious as shown above. The smell when they are done is intoxicating to me. Easily one of my top 5 favorite smells. If you ask nicely, I might name off the other 4. You won’t believe number 3! Alright, enough with the clickbait-y talk. On with the cooking!
There’s only one step left. It’s time to finish the sauce. The boiling sauce reduced down slightly, but I felt I should have let it go longer.
I chose to add the mushrooms and sauce separately on top of the finished steak. The sauce came out a lovely amber color that matched the sautéed mushrooms. The steak was tender and delicious. I really enjoyed this dish and it was not difficult to prepare. I’d rather make carne asada if I had some flank steak sitting around though. That is probably my favorite flavor of flank steak and this generic Marinated Flank Steak is a close second.
GRADE: B+
