This flank will be a master stroke!

Daniel Haupt

20.6.2016

Translation: machine translated

Dear friends of the braise, have you ever heard of flank steak? Also known as flank steak back home? No? Then let's find out. Flank steak is one of my favourite cuts of beef.

Although not every butcher around here might know it, this is one of the most coveted parts of beef in the US and lands on the barbecue grill more than any other cut.

Excellent, juicy - a quick and easy cut to prepare. Normally, flank steaks weigh between 1kg and 1.5kg, but cost significantly less than rib eye steaks & co.

They're a great way to get your meat on the grill.

Like most other steaks I cook on the barbecue, I'm a bit of a purist and only add salt and pepper.

A good hour before putting it on the grill, I take the piece out of the fridge to come to room temperature. This relaxes the meat again and then shortens the cooking process.

To prepare the flank steak, carefully remove the silvery skin with a long knife and trim off the large chunks of fat. You can leave a few small pieces of fat - they add flavour.

You can also cut off any small bits of meat that stick out. Cut them off, but don't throw them away: I also put them on the grill and eat them while I prepare the rest.

About half an hour before cooking, salt the steak. And no, this doesn't dry out the meat. It's true, salt extracts water from the meat, but that's exactly the effect we're looking for here. In fact, the liquid thus binds to the surface of the steak, which then accentuates the formation of the crust when cooking in direct heat on the grill.

Don't, under any circumstances, add pepper to the steak before putting it on the barbecue grill: pepper doesn't handle high temperatures very well. It burns and this leads to the formation of bitter substances - something we want to avoid at all costs for our steak.

To cook, I heat my spherical grill beforehand, until I reach temperatures of between 250° and 300°C. Because it's only in this temperature range that the famous Maillard effect occurs, which gives the delicious grilled flavours. Put the steak on the grill and use the 90-90-90-90 technique: wait 90 seconds, turn the steak 45°, wait 90 seconds and then turn the meat over. And repeat the same operation a second time.

Then finish cooking the meat at a lower temperature using indirect cooking. The biggest challenge for charcoal grills is getting the temperature down quickly. There are several ways of achieving this: you can either take a basket of charcoal out of the grill or cover the grill with a lid laid askew to let the hot air escape - this allows part of the grill to be cooked indirectly, as the temperature is lower there.

Using a meat thermometer, monitor the steak to achieve the ideal degree of doneness - simply stick it at a slight angle to the thickest part of the steak. I wait until the temperature of the flank steak drops to around 54°. I then leave it to rest in tinfoil, at which point the core temperature rises another degree or two Celsius.

Unlike other steaks, flank steak is not served whole, but cut into small strips. To do this, take a sharp knife and cut the steak across the fibres and not in the direction of the fibres, otherwise the meat will be harder to chew. The strips should still have a nice pink colour.

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Daniel Haupt

daniel@project-bbq.de

I was born in the Rhineland, am a project manager in IT and a family man. Away from ones and zeros and at the latest with the move into our home I have found my only true project: The barbecue!
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Since 2015 I have been writing about this on my blog. There I give my readers all sorts of tricks and tricks about barbecuing with charcoal and present my latest creations and ideas.
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You'll find more of me here:
<a href="http://project-bbq.de" target="_blank">project-bbq.de</a> more

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