If you ever decide to purchase an entire cow and cook it at your leisure over the course of <mumpfhymump> years (and I sincerely hope that you do), you’ll notice something. Every chucklehead on the planet has a bright idea about steaks. It’s the rare/insane/dangerous/professional that has any ideas about anything else.
Today, I’m cooking a Sirloin Tip Steak. Somehow, three of these have migrated to the top of my freezer, and I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with them. But they’re like the red-headed stepchild of beef. Nobody talks about them. Nobody, it seems, cooks them much. This will be a challenge.
I like a challenge.
Being called Sirloin Tip Steaks, one would naturally assume they’re off the sirloin primal, right? Yeah, not so much. They’re actually taken from the round, which is a much tougher, more flavorful neighborhood. Like West Philadelphia.
So it stands to reason that I can’t treat these like a steak from Bel Air. I gotta do stuff. But what?
In general, tougher cuts benefit from long, slow cooking times to transmute all that sexy collagen into gelatin. And, upon examination, these steaks appear to have a fair bit o’ connective tissue on them.
I’ve decided I’m gonna treat these guys like ribs. Dry rubbed, then cooked low and slow with some wood smoke over several hours. That process turns ribs into a meltingly lovely experience, let’s see if it’ll do the same here. The wood: hickory. The grill: prepped. Time to get moving.
Dry rub is again Meathead’s Big Bad Beef Rub. I have some left over from last time I did ribs.
Temp is 225 or close enough for jazz. A little olive oil, dry rub, and the steaks go on. Time to cut some trees.
No, that’s not a metaphor. I really do have some trees on my property that I need to cut down.
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Three hours later and my Paul Bunyan urges fulfilled, I check the steaks. Temp is at 164ish, which is well above well done, but south of where we’d want to be for ribs.
But we aren’t making ribs.
Decision time: pull them now, or wait until they’re at a rib-ly 180?
We have two steaks. We can do both.
First steak off at around 165.
The steak is well done, but not crazy burnt. Gray throughout, with a nice crust. This is to be expected from a rib-ly preparation. The rub, as it did on the ribs, crusted well. There may not be enough connective tissue in this cut to fully achieve the supertender, falling off the bone-ness of ribs. There’s no bone, for one thing.
We nosh on this like finger food.
Twenty minutes later, I pull the other steak, circa 180 degrees. It’s definitely more tender, though I’m not sure it’s an order of magnitude more so. It could also be this particular steak. But the piece left on the heat longer benefited from it.
Note: It's dark.
Definitely better.
Verdict: The steaks are more done than I’d prefer them, without any of the alchemy that turns ribs into awesome. Ordinarily, this would be a bigger deal. However, right now, I have a pregnant wife who is steadfastly avoiding any rareness in her meats at all. In addition, she likes her steaks a little more done than I do. So we’ll call this one, if not an overwhelming, blissful success, at least not a failure.
Next time, however, I think I’d try a different cooking method. Knowing what I do now, I’m curious what fast and dry will do for me.
The Wife Says: I will eat this for lunch all week. Me likey.
Up Next: Rocket man!
