Freshly grilled fajitas, Ninfa’s on Navigation in Houston
Careful, hot plate!” the waiter said. The dark brown fajitas at Houston’s Original Ninfa’s on Navigation came on a sizzling cast-iron comal with lots of caramelized onions. The beef was cooked well-done and cut into thin strips against the coarse grain. It was so tough you had to pinch the tortilla to keep from pulling the meat strips out with your teeth when you took a bite. But the beef was very flavorful.
“It’s Certified Hereford outside skirt steak. It’s not marinated at all, it’s just seasoned with salt and pepper and brushed lightly with soy sauce as it comes off the grill,” according to the Ninfa’s meat buyer, an outspoken chef named Mark Mavrantonis.
Faja means “belt,” and fajita means “little belt,” a reference to the shape of the diaphragm muscle known as the outside skirt. Ninfa’s has to pay “a pretty penny” to get the hard-to-come-by USDA Choice outside skirt steaks, Mavrantonis said. Ninfa’s restaurants are the only places in Texas where I have seen American outside skirt in the last few years, and they serve it there to preserve an old tradition.
The Original Ninfa’s on Navigation is the restaurant that made fajitas famous. Thank goodness they still taste like they did in the old days. According to a company press release that came out in 2002, “It is a fact that a true legend of the food business, Mama Ninfa Laurenzo of Houston, Texas, originated the first fajita in the United States in 1973.”
This is one of many claims that have been made about the invention of fajitas. Success has a thousand fathers, as they say—and this success has at least one Mama.
Mama Ninfa was born Maria Ninfa Rodriguez in 1924 in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. She married Domenic Thomas Laurenzo, an Italian American from Rhode Island. In 1949, the couple opened the Rio Grande Tortilla Company on Navigation Boulevard in Houston. Twenty years later, Laurenzo died. In 1973, Mama Ninfa opened a restaurant in the front room of the tortilla factory with ten tables and forty chairs. On her first day, she sold 250 tacos al carbon. The meat was skirt steak, a cut she knew well.
“I grew up in the Lower Rio Grande Valley,” Mama Ninfa told me on the phone in 2003, a year before she died. “When I opened the restaurant, I was just serving the same kind of good honest food that we used to eat at home. Fajitas were an old family recipe.” Mama Ninfa never claimed she had invented fajitas; she just brought the tradition of grilling secondary cuts of beef on a mesquite grill and serving the meat chopped up with condiments and flour tortillas from the Lower Rio Grande Valley to Houston.
A much bolder claim was made by Juan Antonio “Sonny” Falcon, the man who calls himself the Fajita King. Some years ago, under a tent set up on Auditorium Shores for the Hill Country Wine and Food Festival in Austin, I served on a Tex-Mex panel discussion with Falcon. Sonny grew up in Mercedes, Texas, and worked there for a while as a butcher. During the 1960s, while working at the meat counter of Guajardo’s Cash Grocery in East Austin, Falcon claims he gave “fajitas” their name while he experimented with the diaphragm muscle. “It looked like a little belt,” he said. Falcon can document the first time he sold fajitas to the public. It was at a Diez y Seis celebration in Kyle in September 1969.
The late Mama Ninfa at Ninfa’s on Navigation
Falcon’s fame drew a big crowd to our tent at the food festival, including a couple of hecklers. His fellow Tejanos from the Lower Rio Grande Valley loudly contended that their grandmothers were making fajitas before Falcon was born.
“I like Sonny Falcon, I went to school with him. But he didn’t invent fajitas,” said Liborio “Libo” Hinojosa whose family owns H&H Meat Products in Mercedes, one of the Valley’s biggest meat suppliers, “The Lion Mart in Brownsville was selling fajitas at their meat counter way before 1969.”
Jorge Cortez with a sizzling comal at La Margarita
In the Lower Rio Grande Valley, the restaurant most often credited with the invention of fajitas is the Round-Up, in Pharr, which is no longer in business. There the dish was called botanas. The owner, Tila Garza, put grilled skirt steak on top of a plate of nachos and chalupas with some guacamole and lettuce around it and served it as a free botanas, or happy-hour snack. It was so popular she started selling the platter instead of giving it away. And then she put the fajita meat on a sizzling comal and added it to the menu.
“When I got back from Vietnam in the early 1970s, the Round-Up was wildly popular,” remembered Joe Alonso, who once owned several Tex-Mex restaurants in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. “I had a restaurant called Senorial in Alamo at the time,” Alonso said. “Everybody came in and asked for a botanas platter.” Alonso recalled that Senorial was the second restaurant to serve the fajitas-covered botanas. But instead of serving a communal platter, Alonso served his fajitas botanas on individual plates with rice and beans on the side.
Outside skirt went from a dollar a pound in 1971 to $4.79 a pound in 2008. Dr. Gary Smith, a professor in the Texas A&M animal sciences department, encouraged a graduate student named Homero Recio to take a trip to South Texas to trace the origins of fajitas. In his paper on the subject, Recio stated that the term had been in use among butchers of the Lower Rio Grande Valley since the 1940s. According to Recio, the actual originators of what we call fajita tacos were the Hispanic ranch hands who were given the head, intestines, and other unwanted beef cuts such as the diaphragm as part of their pay. They pounded the diaphragm, marinated it with lime juice, and grilled it, then cut it up and ate the meat with salsa and condiments on flour tortillas. Although the name fajita and the serving style is unique to Texas, a similar grilled diaphragm “steak” is also common in Nuevo León, where it is called arrachera al carbón.
The first restaurant to popularize fajitas in Austin in the early 1970s was the Hyatt Regency hotel. The beef was served on a sizzling comal with onions and peppers and the signature spread of tortillas, guacamole, salsa, and condiments. But the hotel chef at the Hyatt balked at serving chewy skirt steak. Instead, he substituted sirloin. It wasn’t long afterward that chicken fajitas made their debut. The fact that chickens don’t have skirt steaks didn’t seem to bother anyone.
FAJITAS ON SALE
An archival search of Brownsville newspapers turns up this grocery store display ad from 1971. The date suggests fajitas weren’t a new item in Brownsville at that time. But the most remarkable thing about the ad is the fact that fajitas were selling for 95 cents a pound, while T-bone steaks were going for 89 cents a pound.
Fajitas are the heart of modern Tex-Mex. They became popular because consumers were rejecting Americanized combination plates in the 1970s and 1980s in favor of more authentic Mexican cuisine. Fajitas weren’t actually Mexican, of course, but at least they represented authentic Tejano cuisine. Texas-Mexicans didn’t eat cheese enchiladas in chili gravy at home–but they did eat fajitas.
Fajitas revived Tex-Mex at a crucial point in its history and went on to become its signature dish. Obviously, a cookbook called The Tex-Mex Grill needs to features some fajita recipes.
But outside skirt steak, the cut that makes the best fajitas, has all but disappeared from retail meat markets. Every supermarket and butcher shop I visited said no one sold them anymore. I tried the inside skirts, which are still widely available—and they were so tough, my table mates declared them inedible.
And then there were the insane prices. Angus inside skirt was selling for the same price as USDA Prime steaks. Why cook tough fajita meat when prime steak was cheaper? To get a handle on the current state of beef I called the agricultural extension service.
At Papa Perez Mexican restaurant in downtown Bryan I split a one-pound order of grilled fajitas with two meat scientists from the Department of Animal Science at Texas A&M University, Meat Science Section leader Dr. Jeff Savell and professor Dr. Davey Griffin. The fajita beef was tender and nicely browned and was served with grilled onions on a sizzling comal. As we made our tacos, I asked them about beef prices.
The demand for expensive steaks was flagging, so prices were falling, I was told. Meanwhile fajitas were in short supply. In 1988, the U.S.-Japan Beef and Citrus Agreement reclassified outside skirt, the cut that started the fajita craze, as tariff-free offal. The Japanese, who used to pay the equivalent of a 200 percent tariff on U.S. beef, can now buy our outside skirt steak with no tariff at all. They are currently importing 90 percent of it.
Meat companies have compensated by offering some new cuts to restaurants. In fact, the Texas A&M meat scientists were working on new cuts used for fajitas and bistro steaks. The meat doctors started rhapsodizing about wedges, flaps, hangers, and tails. At the time, it sounded like they were discussing airplane parts.
“What kind of meat do you use in your fajitas?” I asked the restaurant manager at Papa Perez when he stopped by our table.
“We use inside skirt steak,” he said. “It’s already marinated when we buy it. Then we add our own seasonings.”
“It sure doesn’t get this tender when I grill it,” I said, poking at the taco meat on my plate.
Then the meat experts let me in on the secret: enzymes. To create tender beef fajitas like the ones on our sizzling comal, meat processors treat tough inner skirt with chemical enzymes or natural enzymes such as papain, which is extracted from papaya.
Papain is tricky. It doesn’t start softening up the meat until it is activated by a temperature of around 122˚ F. And once it starts, it doesn’t stop until the meat cools. If you have ever had fajitas that tasted like mush, it’s because the restaurant cooked them too slow or kept papain-treated meat in the warmer or on the steam table too long after it was cooked.
You can get papain in the grocery store; it’s the active ingredient in Adolph’s meat tenderizer. All I had to do was come up with some marinade recipes with papain and backyard barbecuers could make tender inside skirt steak at home, right?
No, it wasn’t quite that simple, the scientists said. When you marinate meat at home, you are lucky to get a 2 percent “take-up rate,” as the measure of absorption is known in the biz. To increase the take-up rate, commercial meat packers do their marinating in a commercial vacuum tumbler. Mechanically tumbling the meat and the marinade in a rotating vacuum container with paddles breaks up and stretches out the protein fibers, increasing the meat’s ability to absorb the liquid.
With as little as twenty minutes of vacuum tumbling, the “take-up” ratio can be increased to 10 percent. Along with the tenderizer and spices, salt and phosphate are also added to increase moisture retention. That makes the meat juicier and pads the meat packers’ profits by increasing the weight.
But it gets even more complicated. There isn’t enough inside skirt steak to satisfy the demand for fajitas, which is why the meat scientists are experimenting with other cuts. These mechanically tumbled, enzyme-treated meat cuts are all sold interchangeably under the umbrella term “beef for fajitas.” You can sample this faux fajita meat at any taqueria in Texas.
Marketing mystery meats under generic names like “beef for fajitas” runs counter to everything being preached in the food world. It’s exactly the kind of deceptive marketing Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan have pointed out in their books.
Inspired by The Omnivore’s Dilemma, in which Michael Pollan goes hunting and butchers a wild hog, young urban food lovers are seeking to understand and deepen their own relationships with meat.
The local food movement has impressed consumers with the importance of provenance. Customers at farmer’s markets are contracting for whole lambs and pigs and people are forming co-ops to share sides of grass-fed beef. Urbanites nationwide are signing up for butchery classes. Food lovers are interested in learning how to cook the whole animal. They are ordering organ meat at restaurants, looking for short ribs and soup bones at the grocery store, and trying to cure their own bacon at home.
But the “get to know your meat” movement looks a little different from Texas. And Pollan’s sense of irony about an intellectual like himself wielding a rifle sounds pretty silly if you hunt routinely. Yet, like meat eaters across the country, I wanted to know where my meat was coming from.
The Texas A&M meat scientists suggested that if I wanted to understand the new fajitas and what’s happening in the fast-changing field of meat fabrication, I needed to learn a little bit about butchery myself. So when we got back to their office, they handed me an application for a class called Beef 101.
SIZZLING FAJITAS AT LA MARGARITA
The twenty-four-hour Tex-Mex restaurant and bakery known as Mi Tierra is an institution in San Antonio. The restaurant got its start when Pete Cortez took over a taco stand in the Mercado in the 1930s. The restaurant expanded several times, taking over most of the adjacent spaces. In 1981, Cortez bought the Produce Row Oyster Bar a few doors down the street and gave it to his son, Jorge, who renamed it La Margarita. Jorge decided to feature fajitas and frozen margaritas at the new restaurant, though they weren’t very popular in San Antonio at the time. He remembers his father’s reaction.
“He said we should work on the menu together, and I told him the menu was already printed,” chuckles Jorge. “He was shocked. Then I showed it to him. The menu had fajitas by the pound. He got really angry. The worst part was, I couldn’t even open the place to prove it would work because I was waiting for these comals and wooden holders I had ordered in Monterrey. Nobody was doing the sizzling fajitas thing in San Antonio yet. I saw meat served that way in Monterrey and I loved the idea, so I ordered a lot of comals down there. But it took a long time to get them. My dad almost killed me. One of the greatest days of my life came a few years later when the restaurant was doing really well and my dad said, ‘Son, that was a pretty good idea.’ ”
La Margarita has become famous for its frozen margaritas, sizzling fajitas, and strolling mariachis. The restaurant still sells Texas oysters on the half shell, too.
The Beef 101 class estimated the yield and grade of steers on the hoof
The front end of a beef carcass was dangling from the ceiling. With a butcher’s hook and a boning knife in my hands, I regarded the bright-red expanse of raw meat. The day before, I had patted this steer on the forehead. On the first day of Beef 101 class, we met at the Texas A&M Beef Center in the rural farmland outside College Station.
As far as butchery classes go, the three-day class called Beef 101 at Texas A&M is the granddaddy of them all and way ahead of the trend. Davey Griffin set up the first class more than twenty years ago. It’s a comprehensive overview of the beef industry from stockyard to cutting floor offered three times a year, and it’s almost always booked solid with food-industry pros.
After several hours of classroom work, we adjourned to the barn out back, where we estimated the grades of six cattle on the hoof, guessing at yield and quality by petting, stroking, and poking the apprehensive animals—just like cattle buyers at an auction barn. We nicknamed the fattest one Porky and predicted a Choice grade (it turned out that we were right).
There isn’t much money in cattle raising. Other than a few giants like the King Ranch, most Texas cattle ranchers are little guys. One of the students in the class works for ConocoPhillips in Houston and has a weekend place near Bryan, where he raises cattle to “get the kids away from the TV.” Half of the cattle in Texas are raised on ranches with fewer than fifty head by retirees, hobbyists, and plain folks trying to avoid property taxes with an agricultural exemption.
My other classmates included a couple butchers from a country grocery store, a guy who wants to open a small meat plant, several chefs, and a lot of food-industry marketing people. We followed the cattle truck over to the Rosenthal Meat Science and Technology Center on campus, a working meat-processing plant. While we watched, a medium-size Angus cross we’ll call Blacky walked down the chute and through the sliding metal door to a small enclosure that he barely fit into. Meat Center manager Ray Riley demonstrated the “cash knocker.”
Riley loaded what looked like a .22 blank into the long-handled device and centered the mushroom-shaped business end of it on Blacky’s forehead. Then he pulled a trigger in the handle, and after a loud report, the animal fell to the ground unconscious. A trap door and tilting floor opened and the device rolled Blacky over to three waiting students who fixed one of his rear legs to a chain that hung from a motor in the ceiling.
The motor pulled the chain and the body up so it dangled overhead. A student with a knife made a foot-long slash between the brisket and throat, and Blacky started bleeding profusely. It takes six to eight minutes to bleed out, and it’s important that the animal remain alive so the heart can pump out all the blood. The animal dies after it bleeds out.
The feet were cut off and the still-twitching carcass moved along an overhead conveyor line called the “rail” while still hanging from the chain. At the next station, the hide was removed with a mechanical hide-puller, then came the evisceration, which was done by hand. The guts were sealed at each end to prevent spillage, and after an incision, the entrails were collected into a wheeled bucket to be sorted later. The head and tail were removed and cleaned.
Finally, the carcass was carefully inspected for bruises, hair, and fecal matter, and any contaminated areas were trimmed away. The whole carcass was cut in half, sprayed with lactic acid in an enclosed booth to retard microbial growth, and moved into the cooler. Blacky had ceased being Blacky and become a piece of beef.
Nobody got sick or left the class, but a lot of Beef 101 students were obviously grossed out. We all watched the process with the hushed reverence of a funeral, and we left with a new respect for both the people who work in slaughterhouses and the animals themselves.
Professor Davey Griffin (left) giving an anatomy lesson with a side of beef. Professor Jeff Savell (right) demonstrating the use of a meat saw.
Day two of Beef 101 started with an anatomy class by Griffin in which we learned the location of each cut of meat on a cattle skeleton nicknamed Bossy. There were some surprises. “This is the Infraspinatus muscle,” said Griffin, holding up a plastic-wrapped cut of meat. “It is the second-tenderest cut of beef after the tenderloin—and it comes from the shoulder clod.” Sometimes called the top blade, it is the cut that yields newly popular flatiron steaks.
After the lecture, we suited up. Dressed in a hair net and a hard hat, white frock and apron, a Kevlar glove and sleeve, and a metal chest protector, I strapped on my knife holder and entered the work area.
Led by Jeff Savell, my Beef 101 team took a meat saw to the four-hundred-pound side of beef, cutting it into chuck, rib, loin, and round—the four primals. The shoulder, or chuck, is the front end; that’s where the brisket and shoulder clod come from. Most of it ends up as ground meat. The rib and loin yield the valuable “middle meats” prized in steak houses. The rump end is known as the round; it was once cut into giant round steaks, and now it yields such prizes as the eye of round roast.
To get the shoulder clod away in one piece, you gently sever the connective tissue that binds the meat to the shoulder blade while you pull down on the meat with the hook. Sliding the boning knife between the bone and the muscle without puncturing the meat requires a delicate touch, while yanking on the hook hard enough to pull the clod away demands brute force. It’s an odd combination of skills—like playing the piano while moving it.
“Put your weight into it,” the young A&M meat science major who served as my mentor encouraged. “I’ll make sure it doesn’t fall on the floor.” I hung on the hook, and finally, the clod pulled away. We flopped it onto the worktable as if it were a thirty-pound fish.
Now we began to “fabricate” our final cuts. There are a lot of different ways to butcher a carcass. You can remove the whole tenderloin—or you can include it in porterhouse and T-bone steaks. You can make rib-eye steaks with the bone in or without. Once upon a time, grocery-store butchers cut the shoulder blade into “seven-bone” pot roasts. Today, the same section of chuck yields flatiron steaks and shoulder tenders, cuts that are turning up in fancy restaurants as “bistro steaks.” After we cut the fajita meat away from the ribs, we removed the first layer of the abdominal wall that’s attached to it. That’s the inside skirt, Savell told me.
After I learned how to cut up a shoulder clod to make flatiron steaks and tenders, I took a break and walked around. Griffin called me over and showed me a piece of boneless short rib so marbled the meat was as much white as red.
Savell pointed out the diaphragm muscle, the famous outside skirt steak. Since the meat runs in a circle around the inside of the thoracic cavity, it was easy to see where it got the “belt” name.
I got the tedious task of cleaning them both. There is a tough membrane to peel away and under that, there’s a layer of silverskin connective tissue that has to be cut off with a knife.
There are two layers of abdominal muscle under the outside skirt. Some people called these tough cuts flap and tail meat, but since both used to go on the ground beef pile, nobody worried much about nomenclature. And that’s how these pieces got lumped together as “beef for fajitas.”
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the word fajitas didn’t mean anything.
THE NEW BISTRO STEAKS AND FAJITAS
Here are some of the newly popular cuts of beef you might find in the grocery-store meat case. We grill them and eat them fajita-style in Texas, but they are known as “bistro steaks” on the east and west coasts because of their popularity in the French bistro dish steak frites.
SIRLOIN FLAP, FLAP MEAT, FLAP STEAK
Called bavette d’aloyau in France, this is an abdominal muscle connected to the inside skirt. Butterflied very thin, it is a chewy but flavorful cut.
FLATIRON STEAK, TOP BLADE STEAK, TEXAS SIZZLER
The second most tender piece of meat on the steer after the tenderloin, this cut comes from the shoulder blade. The cut is shaped like a fish with a spine of tough connective tissue down the center. In Texas the “fish” is often cut into steaks called Texas sizzlers. When you fillet the “fish,” you get two pieces that can be cut into flatiron steaks.
HANGER, HANGING TENDER
A wonderfully flavorful piece of meat that comes away when the animal is eviscerated. Like the outside skirt, the hanging tender was classified as offal under the Japanese tariff agreements; hence the Japanese buy almost all of it before we get any.
CHUCK STEAK, CHUCK TENDERS
Another relatively tender cut from the shoulder clod that’s a bargain in Mexican meat markets.
A triangular piece from the sirloin that’s tough, but makes great fajitas. Tri-tip roasts are the most popular barbecue meat in California.
BONELESS SHORT RIB
Known in Korean barbecue as kalbi, this highly marbled meat is excellent cut into thin sheets, flattened, marinated, and grilled.
On Memorial Day weekend, I grilled up fajitas for a family gathering. But before I let everyone dig in, I made them taste test four different kinds of “fajitas.” The marinated sirloin flap was pretty popular; it beat out the marinated and unmarinated inside skirt and the marinated “beef for fajitas.” The meat came from my brother Dave, who works for restaurant purveyor Ben E. Keith in San Antonio. At my request, he called in fajita samples from meat suppliers. Our taste test represented the most popular meats sold for fajitas in Texas restaurants.
The best restaurant meats we tried were marinated. We can thank vacuum tumbler technology for turning previously tough cuts into excellent fajitas. But as always, there’s a catch. As one A&M meat scientist explained, the process of marinating beef faces the same inherent problem as grinding beef. If you start off with one spot of bacterial contamination on the surface of the meat, you end up spreading it very effectively throughout the entire batch. It’s only a matter of time before we face the first marinated beef recall.
It helps that fajitas are usually cooked well-done. And adding antimicrobial agents to the marinade helps. But read the ingredient list and you have to conclude that you are eating beef in a complex chemical stew.
In another backyard barbecue, I cooked up four more varieties of fajita meat, this time based on what’s available in retail meat markets. I bought marinated inside skirt and ribbon-cut short ribs, and unmarinated chuck steak at a Mexican meat market. The skirt was the most expensive at $4.45 a pound. The other cuts were around $4. The store also sold “res para fajitas,” a hodgepodge of marinated beef trimmings for $2.98 a pound.
When I saw highly marbled boneless short-rib meat for $3.98 a pound at Costco, I impulsively picked some up. It was the same marbled meat that Dr. Griffin had shown me while we were cutting up our sides of beef in class. According to every recipe I could find, the short-rib meat contains lots of connective tissue and needs to be boiled before you put it on a barbecue. But I eat this stuff in Korean barbecue joints all the time—thin-sliced and raw.
I tried to butterfly the meat, but finally I gave up and put it on my handy Krups home meat slicer and cut it into slices about a fifth of an inch thick. I pounded the meat very thin and seasoned it with my usual chile and garlic rub with some Adolph’s meat tenderizer added.
The chuck steak won the taste test. The meat-market marinated inside skirt came in second. The ribbon-cut short ribs were good, but they didn’t look like fajitas. The boneless short-rib meat was so tender it fell apart. In subsequent experiments I cut boneless short rib a little thicker and forgot the Adolph’s. Marinated in a pineapple juice and soy sauce mixture, it was my favorite new fajita stand-in. Further experiments included tender flatiron steaks that I cut from chuck blade roasts and butterflied tri-tip. The flatiron steak fajitas were outstanding. Cutting up the tri-tip was a bit of challenge.
Boneless short rib is the most marbled cut of beef
Bottom sirloin flap, inside skirt steak, and outside skirt steak are similar-looking cuts
Joe T. Garcia’s in Fort Worth seats up to 1,500 people when all the patios are open. Fajitas are by far the most popular order; the tender beef served there takes no effort at all to chew, but it doesn’t have a lot of flavorful char or coarse-grained character, either.
“We use tenderloin for our fajitas,” Joe T.’s owner, Jody Lancarte, said. I was shocked.
Christine Lopez Martinez, the manager of Matt’s Rancho Martinez in Dallas, another restaurant with great fajitas, said Matt’s uses the same cut. “We use beef tenderloins,” she said. “We brush the meat with our Black Magic sauce when it comes off the grill—and that’s it.” The tenderloin they were talking about wasn’t the Prime or Choice stuff you eat in fancy steak houses.
Below USDA Prime, Choice, and Select, there are the USDA Standard, Commercial, Utility, and Canner grades. You never see these in restaurants or grocery stores, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t eating them. USDA inspection is mandatory for all meat plants. Most people assume this means all meat is graded—but it’s not. USDA grading is a service that meat processors can elect to pay extra for. And it costs a lot of money.
A Prime, Choice, or Select grade brings a bonus price; lesser grades don’t add anything to the bottom line. Meat packers don’t waste money getting older or less muscled steers graded. But the meat still gets sold. It’s called ungraded beef. Ungraded tenderloin, known as cow tenders in the meat trade, is relatively cheap compared to USDA Choice inside skirt steak. Meat quality is not as simple as the labels make it seem.
In our final day of Beef 101, we sat in a classroom eating little chunks of beef in plastic cups and rating them on a one-to-ten scale for a variety of sensory evaluation factors including juiciness, tenderness, and overall impression. We checked off flavor notes on a list that included fatty, bloody, livery, grassy, soda, salt, chemical, bitter, soapy, metallic, and a taste researchers describe as “cardboard.”
The first thing that became apparent as we raised our hands to vote for sample A or sample B was that we all had different tastes in beef. The class compared Select to Choice and Prime, wet-aged to dry-aged, grass-fed to grain-fed, and Angus to Charolais and Brahman genetics. We assessed the palatability of beef—which was stripped of labels, prejudices, and romantic steak house ambiance—like meat scientists.
The results were surprising. The vast majority of the class preferred wet-aged beef, despite the exalted reputation of expensive dry-aging. And a USDA Prime rib-eye sample was scored lower by most of the class on overall impression than one particular piece of USDA Choice.
The recession hurt luxury steak houses and raised demand for cheaper beef cuts. But a lot of consumers and restaurant chefs had already tired of big steaks anyway. “I love secondary cuts; choice tenderloin is boring,” Mark Mavrantonis said. “There’s a lot more character in brisket, short ribs, skirts, and some of these other new cuts.”
Tenderloin or fajitas? Prime, Choice, or Select? I used to put a lot of faith in those names, whether I encountered them in restaurants or on the Styrene packages of meat in the grocery store. Now I know better.
When I started testing fajitas, I let flavor and tenderness be my guide. For the inside skirt steak, I bought marinated meats at Mexican carnicerias. But I also adapted some of the new bistro steak cuts to the backyard grill. I think you’ll find some of these “new fajitas” interesting.
Always a Fort Worth favorite, Joe T. Garcia’s opened in 1935
2 cups pineapple juice
2 cups (or one 500-milliliter bottle) soy sauce
3 limes
4 cloves garlic, minced
HOW TO CARVE A TOP BLADE ROAST
TO CUT FLATIRON STEAKS:
The shape of the roast might remind you of a fish with its head removed. On the blunt headless end, find the seam of white connective tissue that runs through the middle of the meat like the spine of a fish. Lay the meat flat and run a sharp knife parallel to the cutting board along the connective tissue as if you were filleting a fish. Turn over and repeat on the other side to remove the white connective tissue. Don’t worry if you lose a little meat.
TO CUT TEXAS SIZZLERS:
Cut straight up and down through the connective tissue to carve the fish-shaped roast into “fish steaks.” Just warn your guests about the tough membrane in the middle of each piece of meat.
1 pound flatiron steaks or 1.3 to 1.5 pounds beef chuck top blade roast
2 cups Tex-Mex Fajita Marinade
Salt and pepper
1 lime
Fajita Fixin’s (see below)
VARIATION
NAKED FLATIRON FAJITAS
Omit the marinade.
FAJITA FIXIN’S
Mix and match your favorites to customize your fajita feast.
Warm flour tortillas
Grilled onions
Grilled peppers
Salsas (see chapter 10)
Chopped tomatoes
Lime quarters
Black olives
HOW TO BUTTERFLY
TO BUTTERFLY: Lay the meat on a cutting board and pretend it’s a book that you are going to open so an equal number of pages end up on each side. Insert a sharp knife on the right side (the left if you’re left-handed) and cut toward the other side, being careful not to cut through the “spine.” Lay the book open and push down on the spine to flatten.
TO DOUBLE BUTTERFLY: Repeat the process, starting at the middle of the book and cutting once in either direction to create a “fold-out section.” You should end up with four flaps of meat.
The fajitas at Original Ninfa’s on Navigation in Houston are made with certified Hereford outside skirt steak
2 pounds grilled fajita meat of your choice,
sliced in thin strips
1 cup cilantro sprigs
1 large tomato, chopped
1 avocado, peeled and sliced
4 green onions, chopped
½ cup thin-sliced raw carrot strips
½ cup thin-sliced jicama strips
¼ cup dry-roasted peanuts, chopped
2 limes, cut into wedges
1 head of romaine lettuce, washed and dried,
for wrappers
1 cup salsa of your choice
6 large or 12 small pita bread rounds
3 pounds grilled fajita meat of your choice, sliced into thin strips
Lime wedges
1 tomato, chopped
Black olives
FAJITAS, CARNE ASADA, AND TACOS AL CARBON
Carne asada is the name used in Sonora and the West Coast of the United States to describe inexpensive beef cuts, such as skirt steak, rump, or sirloin flap, which have been grilled and chopped into thin strips. In Texas, the same cuts are called fajitas, regardless of whether or not they came from a skirt steak. Tacos al carbon, which once meant beef cooked over charcoal, is now used to describe gas-grill beef tacos too.
2 cups cooked black beans, drained and rinsed (one 20-ounce can)
½ cup tahini
½ cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
¼ cup fresh cilantro leaves
¼ cup chopped green onion
3 cloves garlic
¼ cup olive oil
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon powdered chile
Tabasco or other hot sauce, to taste
Salt to taste
2 pounds sirloin flap
6 tablespoons commercial mole (such as Doña Maria)
1 tablespoon chunky peanut butter
¼ cup peanut oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
Salt
