Fresh sliced skirt steak: it can never be too rich or too thin. You need to click to enlarge this. Really, you do.
A few weeks ago, Amiel Nuchovich, occasional Meatist contributor and my token Uruguayan friend, wrote a great piece about the values that can be found at a Spanish market as opposed to your local chain supermarket.
Today, I decided to follow the advice in the pages of my own site and stop in at Las Brisas market in Jupiter.
Just as Amiel wrote, the meat case at Las Brisas was beautiful, packed with meats and meaty parts just waiting to be brought back to my house and ingested. I was dizzy with desire, drooling with anticipation, overwhelmed with options.
When the butcher at last looked my way, I pulled the trigger on some skirt steak, which looked fantastic and was reasonably priced at only $4.59. That’s right, if you’ve been dropping close to 10 bucks for this stuff at Whole Foods, you’re getting reamed, friend.
The next big bonus of buying here after the price: rather than an overly thick slab of plastic-wrapped skirt steak, the kind I’ve gotten at, say, Publix, the Las Brisas butcher took a couple of slabs from the case, smoothed them down on a cutting board, and then hand sliced very thin pieces for me. It was old-school Sam the butcher time. Fantastic.
Into butcher paper went the beef (so much nicer than cellophane) and off went I, a mere $5.92 poorer, but richer a fist-full of beautifully sliced carne.
Never were vegetables so damn sexy. Dig copious amount of jalapeños. Yup, you can enlarge it.
Now, last night I happened to make an enormous batch of salsa fresca (which rocked, by the way), so I slid the beautiful, freshly sliced steaks into a large ziplock bag, added a heaping scoop of salsa, squeezed in a bit more fresh lime juice for good measure, and zipped that bad boy up.
The whole bag sits in my fridge as I type this, meats waiting to get suitably delicious (as if they weren’t already) before being grilled on my Fyrkat tomorrow night, at which point I’ll shoot new photos and follow this up with Part II.
Honestly, I can’t believe it took me so long to hit Las Brisas (I’m not the only one: I had to add it as a Foursquare venue, which means next time I go, I’ll be the mayor), and the only downside of the entire experience was the fact that I don’t speak much Spanish beyond “please,” “thank you,” “yes,” “how much,” and “excuse me,” so I just feel like a putz (gee, that’s a switch) showing off my lack of language skills.
But I’ve got a plan for that: today, I received the latest version of Rosetta Stone for Spanish (Latin American version, levels 1-3 with the online component) from the Amazon Vine program (which means I got it free, suckers, in exchange for a review).
Perfect timing, now that I have yet another good reason to stop wallowing in my mono-linguistic lameness.
Oh, that salsa fresca was the bomb and you need to have a recipe for your meaty friends in your Part II, perhaps, with a little less jalapeño. Holy firey cow it was spicier than the batch a few days ago.
That store’s too far for me, but I’ve heard good thing about the latin chain Sedano’s, which has a store in Lake Worth.
As for having the meat cut, Publix WILL do such a thing on request. I’ve had them butterfly legs of lamb, before I learned to do it myself.
Spanish do love their meat! And they expect you to want a look at the meat before you buy it, too.
Here, they will cut off a hunk, then let you inspect it, then cut off the raggedy bits, and THEN weigh it. Sweet.
The pork is also very good. We have a guy in our village of 3300 people who raises the grain to feed his pigs that he then butchers and makes into sausage, chorizo, chops, and so on. Now that’s man who likes his pork!
Mmm, reminds me of Asian markets too (in Hong Kong and Vancouver) – inexpensive and fresh.
Jo’s right: you need to share your salsa fresca recipe. Dh makes a wonderful one, but one needs to keep refining and comparing.
[...] if you’ve been with me thus far, you know I hit a local Spanish market, Las Brisas, to pick up some fresh-cut skirt steak from the butcher, and immediately began [...]
[...] asked for the recipe for the salsa fresca I made recently, and that I used as a marinade for my skirt steak adventure. I’d be happy to oblige, but there really isn’t one. So I’ll give you the [...]