Buffalo Tri-tip

Here's a new one. Tri-tip is a loin steak cut that in most parts of North America gets turned into ground beef. In California, it's very popular salted and grilled. We'd never had it before, so when I was browsing for my weekend hunk o' meat and saw a buffalo tri-tip, you know I had to get it (even though it wasn't the bright red I might hope for, it still looked exciting - I'm not sure if that's because it's buffalo or because it's a day or two old).

Tri-tip gets its name from its triangular shape that tapers off to a point. This is a perfect cut of meat for families that want their steak cooked differently, as that tapering shape allows some parts of the steak to be medium-rare while the other end is medium-well.

Well, given that I've been test driving Adam Perry Lang's Serious Barbecue, I decided to use the buffalo tri-tip in a modification of Lang's tri-tip with honey-garlic glaze. Here we go:

This book uses multiple flavour layers on the different meats. This recipe has a paste, a seasoning powder, a glaze and a finishing dressing. Oh yeah, baby!

Start with the paste:

¼ cup mild chile powder - I used a mixture of ancho and chipotle - yes, I know chipotles aren't really mild, but I ran out of ancho, and we don't mind spice here.

1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce

1 tbsp soy sauce

1 tbsp beef bouillon (he calls for beef base paste, but I haven't gotten any yet, so I use the cheap stuff)

Thirty minutes before cooktime, mix that goop into a nice paste, as shown above. And now massage it into the meat. It'll take a couple minutes, but it'll make a nice schmear all over the surface of the meat.

Now the seasoning powder:

2 tsp garlic powder

1 tsp kosher salt

1 tbsp lemon pepper

1 tbsp coarsely ground fresh black pepper

1 tsp cayenne pepper

Oh yeah! More pepper!

Now sprinkle that good stuff all over the paste on the meat.

Now let the meat warm up a bit. For steak, given that you won't be cooking that long, you don't want the pink parts to be cold, so I let it warm up for about half an hour before cooking. Meanwhile, prepare the glaze.

2 tbsp apple cider vinegar

1 tsp crushed hot red pepper flakes

¼ cup apple juice

½ cup honey

1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce

5 garlic cloves, chopped finely

4 tbsp butter

Heat all the parts of the glaze in a pan for a few minutes, just long enough to melt the butter. It'll make a completely disgusting-looking shouldn't-ever-be-photographed mess. Kinda like this:

That's congealed bits o' butter in there. Yum! Julia Child would be proud! (Fun fact - the word butter appears nowhere in the Wikipedia's Julia Child page. For shame!)

Okay. So get your grill screaming hot, but only on one side. You're using direct AND indirect heat today. Place the pasted and seasoned buffalo tri-tip on the grill, and sear both sides - about 2 ½ minutes per side.

After you've seared both sides, slide the meat over so that it's not directly over the fire, and paint it with that yummy glaze. Close up the grill, and cook with indirect heat (photo below is from right before moving it to indirect heat).

Now cook the meat for 10 minutes with the lid closed. Meanwhile, make the finishing dressing:

½ cup extra virgin olive oil

1 tbsp lime zest

1 tbsp lime juice

¼ cup finely chopped chives

fleur de sel

At the end of the ten minutes, open up the grill and reapply the glaze. Close up the grill one more time, and cook 6 minutes for rare, 7 minutes for medium and 9 minutes for well-done (adjust as per heat of your grill). Remove from the grill, and let rest on your cutting board 5 minutes or so. Paint on the finishing dressing, sprinkle on the fleur de sel, slice and serve.

Our good camera ran out of battery juice, so I only have this shot of the tri-tip:

It was DELICIOUS. Tender. Juicy. Spicy. My wife says she need never have another kind of steak. And it's a pretty cheap cut of steak (the buffalo tri-tip was only $5 a lb, I imagine beef would be even cheaper). This is an easy preparation, if I'd had the spices mixed ahead of time, we could have even prepared this dinner after work and still had time to get our 3-year old in bed.

Highly recommended.

Served with:

Indian Chai

You've probably had chai, before. Bitter, bland with a mild scent of allspice, it's truly appalling stuff as imagined by the likes of Starbucks or steeped out of the little, flavourless teabags of Bigelow. This is not that chai.

No, this chai recipe was smuggled out of an Indian restaurant in the Bay area of California, then handwritten by a close friend who guarded it for years. For years, she shared the chai with us when we visited, and we would gulp it greedily. Indeed, some of my fondest memories of Houston are of sitting in her kitchen while talking and mainlining chai. This is good stuff, bright, sweet and complex. It's simply delicious.

When we left Houston, we begged the recipe from here. And I present it here:

4 C whole milk
2 C water
3 tbsp sliced ginger (or ½ tbsp powder)
2 tbsp mashed green cardamom pods + 2 shakes cardamom powder
20 cloves
1 ½ tbsp dried basil
1 tbsp cinnamon
½ tsp lemongrass
½ tsp fresh black pepper
1 ½ tsp vanilla
4 tsp Assam looseleaf tea
9 heaping tsp sugar

Prepare the spices.

Mix them with the milk and water and bring to a light boil. Add the tea, and boil gently for two minutes. Now strain out the spices. (Note, leaving it to settle for a few minutes after sieving is useful to get some of the spices to settle out, as a slight sludge will form).

Add the sugar and vanilla, and stir in. Serve in large mugs. Huge, even. Large servings are completely appropriate here. And anything you don't drink while hot, will be great over ice.

Caprese salad

I don't get "food fads". If something is good, it's good, whether it's new or old. If something is bad, making it novel doesn't help. In our home, tasting good is a pretty huge priority, so we're huge fans of all the fun heirloom tomatoes that you can get in southern California farmer's markets.

This preparation seems to have gone out of favour in recent years, but we still serve good tomatoes this way whenever they're available. It's simple and fresh. Bright and yummy. And it's a speedy appetizer that we can put together when we're spending more time putting together the main course.

Caprese salad takes advantage of the fresh flavours of fresh food:

fresh tomatoes, sliced (our favourite variety is green zebra, but those aren't ready from the garden yet - these are some other heirloom variety)

fresh basil leaves (we keep these in the garden)

fresh mozzarella (which is basically the Italian version of chenna)

extra-virgin olive oil

fleur de sel

fresh black pepper

Layer the tomatoes, basil and mozzarella. Drizzle with olive oil, salt and black pepper over the salad. Serve. When you pick it up to eat it, make sure you get a slice of tomato, basil and mozzarella each time you pick up a slice.

Enjoy.

East Coast/West Coast

San Diego has the best cooking scene of anywhere I've lived. Produce. Meat. Wine. Fish. You name it, we can get it here. As a home cook, this is of course fantastic.

But San Diego's restaurant scene makes me cry. Case in point: We just returned from a visit to family in the Washington D.C. area. As part of our visit, we met some friends in the highly acclaimed restaurant Proof. In the same price range as Blue Point in downtown San Diego, these restaurants might as well be in different galaxies. The food at Blue Point is good, but certainly not memorable. The food at Proof made me cry tears of pure ecstasy.

I'm not that food blogger who takes pictures of my dinner in the restaurant. Sorry. So if you're looking for photos, head over to Proof. We started with the charcuterie plate, waiting for us when we arrived (our friends arrived 15 minutes earlier). The star was quite obviously the Pate Campagne with Sour Cherries & Pistachios. Sweet and rich. Spread on the toasted bread they brought us, it was delicious. This pate was pure perfection.

We took a collaborative approach to dinner, ensuring that no one would order the same thing. It's important to have friends who will do this with you - it expands the range of things you can taste without increasing the cost. For firsts, we ordered Grilled Spanish Octopus, Ahi Tuna Tartare, Sautéed Potato Gnocchi with Red Scallions & Asparagus, Sheep’s Milk Ricotta with Smoked Prosciutto & Warm Flatbread. All four were quite tasty, but the gnocchi and tuna tartare were divine. The tartare tasted of sesame and raw tuna, and was perfectly balanced with sheets of toasted seaweed in between.

For seconds Sautéed Day Boat Scallops, Miso Glazed Sablefish, Honey & Spice Glazed Pekin Duck Breast and Crispy Duck & Pork Confit. The miso glazed white sablefish was perfectly cook. Tender and soft, rich and sweet, it was perfection. The duck breast was also done outrageously well. The pork confit was slightly overcooked, a sin that was quickly forgiven due to the perfectly done duck confit.

For dessert, two of us ordered the Rhubarb and Strawberry Shortbread, one ordered the Chocolate Bread Pudding and one ordered the Raspberry Panna Cotta. You may remember my thoughts on contaminating rhubarb with other fruit, but this was crazy good. Only a tiny amount of strawberry to flavour the rhubarb, not the other way around, and the sugar was perfectly balanced - resulting in a slightly sweet rhubarb flavour. Delicious. The panna cotta and bread puddings were also really, really great.

This is what fine dining should be. When you pay as much as you do at a place like Blue Point or Proof - the food should be dynamite. It should be perfectly executed, and it should be exciting. Sadly, this kind of dining seems to be lacking in San Diego. We've had good food, and very-good-for-the-money-food, but we've had no restaurant meals that make us sigh wistfully, and recount to friends that fabulous meal we had one time... We'll have to rely on our biannual forays east to satisfy our fine dining cravings. Or perhaps a field trip to Los Angeles...