Cuban · Main
Vaca Frita
- Intermediate
- 35 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, a warm current of chile, ending saline and clean.
Ingredients
- 1kg beef flank or skirt
- 2.5 litres water
- 1 white onion, halved, plus 2 more sliced thin for frying
- 1 carrot, in chunks
- 3 bay leaves
- 10 black peppercorns
- 35g garlic (about 10 cloves), mashed
- 120ml lime juice, or naranja agria
- 4g ground cumin
- 12g salt
- 100ml olive oil
- 1 lime, in wedges
The skills inside
The words inside
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Simmer the flank with the halved onion, carrot, bay and peppercorns in barely trembling water until a strand pulls free with no spring left in it, about 90 minutes; let it cool in the broth. 90 min
- Shred the meat along the grain into thin strands, then squeeze each handful dry over the sink so no broth is left in it.
- Toss the strands with the mashed garlic, lime juice, cumin and salt and leave exactly 30 minutes, no longer. 30 min
- Get a heavy pan or plancha very hot with a film of olive oil, lay in half the beef in a thin layer, press it down flat and do not touch it until the underside is mahogany and crisping at the edges.
- Turn once, throw in half the sliced onion and let it char at the edges while staying juicy at the heart, squeeze lime into the pan so it hisses, scrape up and serve at once; repeat with the second batch.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Griddle & plancha work 45 recipes
- Full contact with the metal: the food lies flat, with no dome in the middle and no curled edge lifting it away, so browning reaches the entire face rather than a ring of it.
- Contact is immediate and audible, and the food stays where it is put rather than sliding around in a slick of its own released liquid.
- The cooked face is an unbroken sheet of even colour: the whole surface browned, not a pattern of marks with pale ground between them, and not a dark centre with pale corners.
- The metal around the food is dry: no spreading wet patch steaming out from under it, nothing weeping onto the surface and boiling there.
- Turned once or twice and no more, and lifted while the crust is still brown: a piece flipped repeatedly never holds heat long enough to build one.
Where it goes wrong The surface was crowded and its temperature crashed, so everything gave up its water at once and stewed on the metal: pale, damp, grey at the edges, and stuck fast where the crust never got the chance to form.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Cabernet Sauvignon or Malbec
- Also Right
- Tempranillo (Rioja Reserva)
- From the Taps
- Amber ale
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water, make room
Tannin binds to seared protein and fat: each bite softens the wine, each sip resets the palate: the steakhouse equation.
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