Like every Argentinian, I love milanesas. They are delicious, easy to make and relatively cheap. You can eat them both hot and cold, by themselves or in a sandwich, by themselves or with toppings. And you can make them with a variety of beef cuts, as long as they are cut thin.
The vest and most typical milanesas are milanesas de ternera, or veal milanesas. Alas, I don’t eat veal in America. I do understand that all meat eating is cruel, but I find the treatment of calves to be particularly heartbreaking. I just can’t eat it.
My actual meat choice for milanesa is top round (cut very thin). It has good flavor, a nice bite (but you do have to cut it thin) and not much marbling (milanesas don’t need it). There is one major fat streak dividing the steaks, and sometimes I simply cut if off, dividing them into two small steaks, which I can then pile in a sandwich. However, thin-cut top round steks are now $16/lb, so I only buy it when it’s on sale – which is not too frequently.
Thin-cut top sirloin is also a good choice for milanesas. The additional marbling makes it very tender, but it’s hard to trim the big pieces of fat without destroying the shape of the steak. It’s also not as flavorful as top-round (don’t ask me why, I’ve no idea). It sells for $18 at my Safeway, but I lost bought it on sale for $10/lb. Thin-cut Tri-Tip is not available at my local Safeway but I got it once at another supermarket and it worked quite well. It’s been too long so I don’t remember where I rated it vis a vis the other cuts, but I do remember I thought it worked.
One cut that doesn’t work is bottom round. At Safeway, it’s cut thicker than I like. It’s also tough (though OK with tenderizing), filled with grizzle and not as tasty. At $13/lb regular price, it’s cheaper than the other choices.
One thing to keep in mind: you can prepare the milanesas and freeze them uncooked. You can fry them without defrosting them without losing too much quality.
Tri-tip, that so-very California cut, was on sale at Safeway last week. It was $7/lb for the untrimmed roast and $10/lb for the steaks (down from $19/lb regular price). Last time I got the roast, it has almost as much fat as meat, so I decided to give the steaks a try this time. In the photo on their website, the steaks looked trimmed. I had bought this cut before in the past, and had worked quite well.
Alas, instead of getting three trimmed tri-tip steaks, I got a bunch of untrimmed smaller steaks. Here is the picture of just one:
I did trim them before grilling them, but the flavor was also sort of off – not as having gone bad, but just not having the great flavor that tri-tip usually has. I’m not an expert on beef, but I wonder if Safeway is getting worse quality meat to be able to put it on sale. The problem is that not knowing whether this is the case, makes me feel reluctant to buy it at regular price as well.
Now, don’t get me wrong, in these times when beef is so astronomically expensive, I very much appreciate Safeway’s sale prices, which I suspect may be loss leaders – but I also want to get what I think I’m ordering.
Top Sirloin roast was on sale this week at Safeway this week, for just $7/lb, and I ordered one with a couple of dishes in mind (Beef Stroganoff and Cambodian beef sticks). What I got was sirloin cap. This is, indeed, part of the top sirloin, a triangular cut with a thick layer of fat on top – which Safeway nicely trimmed (though I had to trim it away for my uses).
This cut is prized in Brazil as picanha and has become popular in the US in recent years, as other once cheap cuts that could be used for steaks have become too expensive for regular use. I have no doubt that the same will happen to sirloin cap.
I will try making an actual roast next time it goes on sale, but for the time being I can say that the cut worked well for grilling as thin strips – it was tender but with a nice grain/pull -, but it failed as cubes for the stroganoff. I’m not surprised as sirloin in general tends to acquire a dusty texture when cooked wet. It might work if I’d cut it into thin slices here as well.
Update: Sirloin roast went on sale again and I got one planning to grill it – but fall weather is upon us, and I had a cold, so I didn’t feel like going outside to grill.
I oven-roasted the picanha, and I can’t say it was too successful. I did overcook it a little. The flavor was OK, somewhere between a top sirloin steak (which I don’t like) and a NY strip steak (which I do like). I overcooked it, but the texture wasn’t dusty. The problem is that it was a bit tough.
I might try this again next summer and grill it, but I wouldn’t buy it to cook in the oven *unless* I had to make a roast and couldn’t afford a tri-tip.
Safeway had prime rib roasts on sale before Christmas, and while I haven’t been into beef lately, I couldn’t pass it up. I’m glad I didn’t, because the roast beef was delicious. I found inspiration on several recipes online, but mine was simplified to just include butter, garlic and rosemary – because I grow a lot of the latter. I neglected to take a photo, so just picture a beautiful roast.
Ingredients
1 ~5lb bone-in rib roast
4 Tbs butter, softened or melted
8 garlic cloves, peeled and minced
1 1/2 Tbsp rosemary leaves, chopped
generous kosher salt
pepper to taste
Instructions
Remove roast from fridge about an hour before you want to cook it. Remove packaging and pat dry.
Preheat oven to 500F
Mix the softened/melted butter with the garlic, rosemary, kosher salt and ground pepper.
Brush in the butter over all sides of the roast. Set on a roasting pan bone-side down. Place in the oven and roast for 15 minutes. Turn temperature down to 325F and continue roasting for about 15 minutes per pound (so 1 1/4 hrs for a 5 lb roast) for medium rare. Remove, tent with aluminum foil or cover with cloth towels and rest for at least 15 minutes.
Birria, a Mexican dish of goat or beef marinated and stewed in a sauce made with vinegar, dried chilis, garlic and herbs, is having a moment here in the US. Quesabirria tacos, tortillas filled with birria and melted cheese, are suddenly all the rage and have been added to the menus of both Mexican restaurants and taquerias all over the place, while people try to recreate them at home. It’s thus no wonder that Trader Joe’s would come up with its own, frozen beef birria.
I tried it last week and I was unimpressed. The beef just lacked flavor.
The beef comes in large boneless pieces swimming in sauce. While you have to heat it in the plastic bowl it comes in (it’s frozen, after all), you do need to transfer it to a different plate to shred it. Obviously this is still less work that making your own birria, but I’d preferred if the meat was pre-shredded. That might also have helped it draw some of the flavor from the sauce. The sauce wasn’t super flavorful either, but a bit better than the bland beef.
Now, the beef does work well if you are going to add more flavorful elements to your tacos. I didn’t have any shredded cheese at hand – and I wasn’t about to chop anything – but I added some commercial sour cream and guacamole (not usual for birria tacos) and they were better.
The 16oz dish was $8, which doesn’t seem too bad, but I wouldn’t order it again.
Tri-tip is a very Californian cut of meat, it comes from the “bottom sirloin sub primal” and it has a very distinctive triangular shape. It’s a very lean cut of meat, but quite tender, and can be grilled, roasted, slow cooked with bbq sauce or even thinly sliced for everything from bulgogi, to beef Stroganoff to stir fries. In California, you can usually buy either trimmed – with the otherwise thick layer of fat surrounding it removed – or untrimmed. The untrimmed version often goes on sale at my local Safeway, which makes it a very tempting cut to get during these times when meat prices are through the roof.
I’ve been cooking tri-tip for over twenty years, but it never occurred to me to check whether this cut was used in Argentinian cuisine. So it was only last week that I found out that tri-tip is colita de cuadril, which in Argentina is usually stuffed and then grilled. I don’t think my father ever made it, I don’t have any childhood memories of stuffed meat, beyond matambre, which is actually thin flank steak rolled around the stuffing. Of course, as soon as I ran across these Argentinian colita de cuadril recipes I wanted to ask my dad about it, but he passed away a couple of years ago. Alas, I did write about it on Facebook and tagged him – and a couple of his friends responded telling me about it. That was very sweet, and I’m writing it down here so I can remember how nice it felt.
In any case, I had bought a twin pack of tri-tip roasts on sale and had used one to make Floribbean Tri-tip Roast with Chimichurri Verde, so I had another one already trimmed and ready to be stuffed. There are many ideas for stuffings online, and this one sounded particularly good. I did adapt it considerably to account for my taste and ingredients available in California (in other words, I did not use blood sausage).
I roasted the tri-tip rather than grilling it, and I overcooked it (you might want to cook it for 30 minutes total and check to see if it’s done), but overall it was a very tasty dish and I would make it again – though what I really want to do is experiment with different stuffings, so if tri-tip continues to be on sale this summer, you can expect more recipes.
The hardest part of making stuffed tri-tip is cutting the tri-tip. You want to cut as wide and deep a hole as you can without opening up any sides. I found that cutting a couple of inches deep at a time worked best. But I also found that I didn’t have a knife long enough to go all the way to the end, and my hand was too big to get inside it. I think I might invest in a long knife for future tri-tips.
Ingredients
1 tri-tip roast
1 tsp olive oil
3 thick bacon slices, cut into 1/2″ pieces
1/2 onion, chopped
1 large leek, trimmed and white and stalk thinly sliced in semi-circles
salt & pepper to taste
1 small apple, diced
1 9oz Mexican chorizo
4 – 6 oz fresh Mozzarella, cut into big chunks.
Directions
Preheat oven or grill to 300°F.
Trim excess fat from both sides of the tri-tip. Make a wide incision on the center of the larger end of the tri-tip and cut across the wide side, being careful to not pierce the sides. Continue cutting deeper and deeper, as wide as you can without piercing the sides and as far as you can get. Set aside while you prepare the filling.
Heat oil over medium heat in a sauté pan. Add the bacon bits and cook until the fat is rendered, about 5 minutes. Add the onion and cook until it starts to soften. Add the leek and cook for a couple of minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Add the apple and cook for a couple more minutes. Remove the chorizo from its casing and add to the sauté pan. Continue cooking, stirring frequently, until the chorizo is cooked through.
Stuff the tri-tip alternating between Mozzarella chunks and stuffing, going as deep into the tri-tip as possible and filling it up as much as you can. If you are grilling it, tie the roast shut with kitchen string.
Transfer roast to a baking sheet and roast in the oven for about 15 to 20 minutes per side. Alternatively, place on the grill over indirect heat and cook for about an hour, turning half way.
Tonight for dinner, I made a fabulous oxtail stew from a recipe from Jerez de la Frontera – I will publish it shortly. Making the stew, however, was far easier than actually procuring the oxtails. They used to be a relatively cheap cut of meat, but I guess demand has gone up as prices are through the roof and all over the place.
I ordered my first four pounds of oxtails from Safeway, as they were on sale for $7/lb. This is what passes for a very good price right now for a cut that is mostly bone, fat and gelatin and, as a result, has very little meat. As usual, I asked for no substitutions as Safeway almost invariably substitutes the meat on sale I order for far more expensive stuff. Indeed, I’ve had to call to complain about these substitutions so often, that the day before I placed this order I spoke with two different Safeway employees about the fact that I did not want any substitutions, no matter how well intentioned they were.
Anyway, I digress, but as I half expected, Safeway did not send me the 4 lbs of $7/lb oxtails I ordered, but instead sent me two small packages of vacuum packed oxtails for $13/lb! To add insult to injury, those packages included some of the thinnest bones from the tail. I was not happy. I got a refund, but was still left in need of another source for oxtails to have enough for my recipe.
What do you think Safeway guarantees 100%?
Enter Cardenas supermarket, which also had fresh oxtails on sale, for $9/lb (though closer to $11/lb when you add Instacart fees and tips). That might seem a lot, but the price of oxtails at other supermarkets was even higher. They were $10/lb at Costco, $13/lb at Raleys, $17.3 at 99 Ranch Market and $23/lb to $34/lb at Hmart! Now, these are Instacart prices, but what the hell???!!!!
There were significant differences between the oxtails I got from Cardenas (those seen at the top of the pan) and Safeway (bottom). The former were all medium to large pieces, and had a fresh red color. The latter included quite a few small bones, and they had a weird purplish color, that didn’t quite show up in the picture, probably from the packing method. Still, once I cooked them they were all very good. Indeed, the tiny pieces had very little meat but what they had was particularly succulent, probably as it shared more surface area with the sauce.
I was telling my husband how this could have been an $80 dish if I hadn’t shopped so carefully (frankly, it’d have been more – I’d forgotten about the $16 bottle of sherry I’d pour into the stew). He said he felt it’d have been worth $80. He is a smart man.
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Note: the link to Instacart is a referral link, if you subscribed immediately after you click on it, I might get $10 credit and you would as well. You probably can get a better deal elsewhere, though.
This year, I made a standing rib roast for both Thanksgiving and Christmas. The 2-rib Thanksgiving roast was bought at a local butcher. It was expensive, so much so that my husband hid the total price from me to not give me a heart attack. Still, we had had a similar roast from that butcher 16 years before and he had dreamt about it every since, the Pandemic Thanksgiving seemed like a good time to revisit it. We all loved it. My husband rated it a solid 8.5-9 in a 10 point scale.
When time came for making our Christmas menu, both of them requested a prime rib roast again. I wasn’t thrilled about cooking the same thing, and there was no way I was going to revisit that expense – but when I saw that Raley’s had the equivalent cut for $6/lb I decided to give it a go.
I will admit that I was apprehensive. These days you a chuck or eye of roast costs about that much. But Raley’s advertised the meat as being choice grade, so I figured why not? I was pleasantly surprised.
Even though I kept the meat in the fridge until its “sell by” date, the roast was very good, tasty and tender. Not as much as our uber-expensive Thanksgiving roast, but much more than it had any right to be for the price. My husband gave it a 7/10. I would not hesitate to serve it to guests.
And I just might, because it seems Raley’s has sales on prime rib every year around the holidays.
Finally, Raley’s advertised its roast as “Beef Ribeye Roast, Bone In” which confused me for a while. I knew that butchers call a prime rib roast devoid of bones “ribeye roast”, but I thought that if it had the bones it was called “prime rib” or “standing rib roast”. So I spent a fair amount of time researching this. You can do the same, but for all extents and purposes, if what you want to make is prime rib or a standing rib roast, this is the same thing by another name. Do remember that “prime” can refer both to this cut, but also to the grade of meat. Prime grade beef has greater fat marbling than choice grade meat, which has itself more marbling than “select”, a grade that seems to have disappeared from supermarkets in the last few years.
I wasn’t planning to buy beef tenderloin when I went to Grocery Outlet last week – but I saw it in the front case for just $6 a pound, and it seemed too much of a bargain to pass up. Really, I should have known better. As we say in Spanish, lo barato sale caro or what’s cheap, costs you more.
It’s grilling season for us (in other words, I’m happy to throw something on the grill this summer, but I’ve no desire to otherwise cook), so I coated the tenderloin with a herb mixture and then grilled it. I will admit that I overcooked it – it was much thinner in parts than your regular tenderloin – but that wasn’t really the problem. The quality of the beef was.
I can’t quite pinpoint what the problem was, maybe because it was a combination. The herb coating was great, but the rest of the beef lacked any beef flavor, if anything it had the offputting flavor of cheap meat (duh!). The texture was off as well, and it was just not enjoyable to eat.
My tenderloin was about 2 1/2 pounds so we ate maybe a third of it, and kept the rest as leftovers. It’s been several days, and none of us have reached out to eat the remaining. I may slice some and add it to nachos today, but the rest will go to the dog.
Lesson learned: don’t buy cheap beef.
Note: I don’t recall what brand it was, but it’s one often carried by Grocery Outlet – I’ll make a note of it next time I go.
I usually use thinly cut top round to make milanesas. While the cut has an annoying fat vein in the middle, it’s very tender, the version sold by Safeway is very thin and it just works great for milanesas.
This week, however, Safeway had thinly cut bottom round at half the price as top round – so I figured that I would give it a chance and see how it worked. The answer is that it will do in a pinch, but it’s definitely inferior to top round.
First, the “thin” bottom round steaks sold by Safeway were two to three times thicker than the top round ones. Bottom round is a very tough cut of meat, so I beat the hell out of the meat to tenderize it. It worked quite well, though I ended up with a blister on the side of my finger. A larger problem was that as the cut was thicker, so were the pieces of fat/gristle in the middle of the steaks. There weren’t too many and I try to cut them, but it made it harder to eat the milanesas in sandwiches (it’s not a big deal if you’re using fork and knife). I also don’t think the flavor was as tasty as the top round, but the issue might also have been the olive oil I was using.
All in all, I’d use bottom round again under similar circumstances, but at full price, I definitely prefer top round.
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