A Lowbrow Culinary Triumph

Marinated flank steak grilled up on the barbecue must be one of the easiest and most common dishes to prepare, especially here in the barbecue-happy West. My roommates and I in college were marinating and grilling flank steak, tri-tip, and any other cheap piece of beef we could find when we had little money or cooking experience, so there is little innovative or complicated about it. Just about anybody who has ever thrown a slab of meat on a hot grill has a go-to beef marinade recipe.

It is relatively easy, then, to get a good meal out of marinated flank steak. However, a great meal is one to be celebrated and shared. Simple and undoubtedly common though it is, the recipe we used this weekend gave us a truly great meal.

The marinade recipe used the expected soy sauce (1/2 cup), garlic (5 smallish cloves, minced) and olive oil (1/4 cup). This one was different from marinades I had used in the past in that it called for a portion equal to the soy sauce of a fruity red wine. Admittedly, this is not at all an unusual ingredient for a marinade, but not one I had tried before. I used one of the unopened bottles of red wine we happened to have around – a Beringer Alluvial, not the French wine. A fruitier variety like a Merlot might have added more flavor, but what I used was perfectly adequate. (I’m trying really hard to sound like a Northern Californian here.)

I added fresh pepper but omitted parsley, scored the 1 ½ lb steak diagonally every two inches or so, then marinated the whole thing overnight. Before grilling, I salted and peppered the meat directly. On a hot grill, I cooked each side four minutes, moving the steak to the unused part of the grill with a ninety degree turn halfway through cooking on each side.

The meat came out a perfect medium rare, tender throughout with tremendous flavor. Part of the appeal, I suppose, came from the saltiness of the marinade, but the wine added a subtle but distinct flavor that went beyond what straight soy sauce can provide. Even my considerable powers of modesty cannot keep me from saying that it was just about the best flank steak I have ever had.

What made the whole thing amusing, on top of being tasty, was that I found the recipe through an iPhone recipe app. I knew we had a flank steak we need to cook, so I typed in "flank steak" into the program, and it gave us a great Sunday evening meal to top off an excellent family weekend.

Yes, I have an iPhone recipe app. Two of them, in fact. What of it? We can’t all be graduates of Le Cordon Bleu.