The Meatwave

As I look a week ahead, the season of large hearty roasts quickly shifts gears into my favorite food group—party foods. New Years kind of kicks off a month long obsession with meals comprised of bite sized portions as I use New Years Eve and the end of the football season as excuses to fill my diet with all the wings, nachos, and stuffed jalapeños my heart desires. To mash-up finger foods with comforting steak—another item I let into my winter rotation in unhealthy quantities—I bring you these steakhouse kebabs, delivering big beefy flavor on a stick.

When I say I like to eat steak in the winter, I'm talking about the good stuff—my January birthday provides the perfect excuse to splurge on the finest dry-aged strips or porterhouses. These intensely beefy cuts need nothing more than salt and pepper to bring them to perfection, but kebabs didn't seem the right place to shell out for the best of the best. That left me with the challenge to get big beefy flavor in a less-than cut of the steer.

To accomplish that, I started with moderately flavorful and moderately tender sirloin tips. To heighten its flavor into more acceptable territory, I turned to some of the standards that make a subpar steak more palatable. That included Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, Dijon, and lemon juice, which I whisked into a marinade along with olive oil, garlic, and brown sugar.

My not so tender, not so flavorful beef cubes marinated in this mixture for a few hours. Although marinades don't penetrate much beyond the surface, I wanted to give it enough time for the glutamates in the soy sauce and Worcestershire to work their magic on enhancing the flavor of the beef.

Once done in the marinade, I skewered the beef with steakhouse appropriate accompaniments. First were red onions that I had cut into 1 1/2-inch squares to match the size of the beef cubes. Each square was stacked three onion layers high, which gives the onion more stability on the stick. Interspersed with the onion and steak were mushrooms, which I hoped would add a hearty, earthy compliment to the beef.

Once I had them all skewered up, I brought the kebabs to a hot fire and placed them over direct heat. The sugar in the marinade helped the exterior of the steak brown quickly and beautifully, which is important because taking too long to sear has the potential to result in over cooked meat. By the time I had nice browning on all four sides of the beef, the insides were still a decent rosy medium, making them more tender, juicy, and flavorful than if they were cooked to medium-well or well.

The final kebab delivered big on beefy flavor. It was a bit of smoke and mirrors though, since the beef got a decent lift from the robust marinade, but the flavors were such that in the end the entire thing just tasted beefy more than anything else. Pairing well with the mushrooms and onions, this did feel like a steakhouse meal on stick, which was a perfect combination of form and flavor for winter eating.

Published on Tue Dec 23, 2014 by Joshua Bousel

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