Skirt Steaks: Peasant Food and Grossly Underrated

John Priske recommended skirt steaks, as viable alternative to New York strip or rib eye steaks, both of which were sold out. John and his wife Dorothy operate Fountain Prairie Farms, where they raise Highland beef and operate a bed and breakfast inn.

Their farm is about 30 miles north of Madison, Wis. Their custom raised, slaughtered and aged beef has become popular with Madison foodies. They sell it at the Madison’s farmers’ market and directly to a number of restaurants in the region. They have a hard time keeping up with demand, particularly the demand for traditional steaks.

While visiting them a few years ago, the only steaks he had were skirt steaks. At the time I wasn’t familiar with cut.

“They’re really flavorful,” He said. “You sear them on the grill like a flank steak and thinly slice them across the grain.”

John was right. I’m particularly fond of the short ribs and ox tails he sells. These are peasant cuts of beef. Well the skirt steak is a peasant steak. It’s become my favorite.

Peasant foods often have very honest but nevertheless colorful names attached to them. Sometimes you just know some things are good by these common names. The steak comes from the belly of the beast. It’s one of four diaphragm muscles located between the brisket and the flank. We’re not talking rib eye, New York strip, T-bone or tenderloin.

In New York, the steak house name for this cut of beef is Romanian tenderloin. “Romanian,” in this case, tells us it’s not a tenderloin.  It’s a peasant steak and anything but tender. That’s why when seared to a medium rare it’s served thinly sliced. All the same, it is possibly tastiest steak from a side of beef which for years languished in relative obscurity.

Until the early 1970s, about the only restaurants featuring these steaks were Greek-American, where it was typically offered as a lowly breakfast steak. Otherwise, skirt steaks most often wound up with the other less than prime cuts and ground into hamburger. In the early 70s Mexican cuisine started to find its way into mainstream American dining and hence the skirt steak’s other common name -- fajita. Wikipedia tells us about its more colorful history:

“In Spanish "faja" means belt or girdle; "fajita" is the diminutive form. In original Tex-Mex culinary parlance, fajitas are a dish with roots in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas from a specific cut of meat: skirt steak. . . .

The first serious study of the history of fajitas was done in 1984 by Homero Recio as part of his graduate work in animal science at Texas A&M. Recio was intrigued by a spike in the retail price of skirt steak, and that sparked his research into the dish that took the once humble skirt steak from throwaway cut to menu star. Recio found anecdotal evidence describing the cut of meat, the cooking style (directly on a campfire or on a grill), and the Spanish nickname going back as far as the 1930s in the ranch lands of South and West Texas. During cattle roundups, beef were butchered regularly to feed the hands. Throwaway items such as the hide, the head, the entrails, and meat trimmings such as skirt were given to the Mexican vaqueros (cowboys) as part of their pay. Considering the limited number of skirts per carcass and the fact the meat wasn't available commercially, the fajita tradition remained regional and relatively obscure for many years, probably only familiar to vaqueros, butchers, and their families.”

Call it a cowboy steak if you like, it’s peasant food.  It is one of the few cuts of beef that’s great both for grilling and braising. Above all, it’s held in high regard for its flavor.

Think of a fancy restaurant describing its Romanian beef entre as “Thin slices of Romanian Steak slowly braised in rich mushroom wine sauce with . . .”

In a truly outstanding restaurant, the chef would not hesitate to pan sear a skirt steak in tallow, serve it thinly sliced medium rare nestled in a bed of caramelized root vegetables and topped off with an honest Bordelaise sauce. You get the picture. It’s not the one pictured here.

The picture with this post is from Recipes.Com. (Full Text, and do be sure to hit the side bar for Vegas Strip Steak. It looks a world like a skirt steak to me.) In this well received recipe for “Flank Steak Bordelaise,” the steak used is a less flavorful close cousin to a skirt steak. The sauce is “Bordelaise” in name only. A true bordelaise sauce is a demi-glaze based red wine sauce finished with a thin sheen of butter and diced bone marrow. Tallow, demi-glaze and marrow are far beyond the reach of most restaurants. Ironically, the things of haute cuisine have their foundation in peasant cooking. As for a true bodelaise sauce, it you have time for it, you can make it at home. Plan on spending a day making a good beef stock and reducining it to a demi-glaze.

In short this recipe, while highly rated, comes up short. It’s not a skirt steak and it’s not bordelaise sauce.

The butcher at my local store will occasionally offer skirts steaks. It seems that in Cedarburg, Wis., most consumers are not familiar with this cut of beef. It has become expensive. He doesn’t offer them unless they’re priced right from the packing house.

This weekend I’ll be visiting John and Dorothy Priske. I will buy a few skirt steaks. In a future post I’ll tell you how to serve these up with true bordelaise sauce.