Carne asada is typically made with skirt steak, but I wanted to test out a variety of inexpensive cuts to be sure. I bought a half dozen different cuts of beef and marinated them in a basic mixture of lime juice, garlic, cilantro, olive oil, and chilies before grilling them to medium rare over hot coals.
- Hanger is big and beefy, with a nice coarse texture that takes well to marinades, but its large triangular cross-section is not ideal for taco or burrito fillings.
- Flank steak is easy to cook and slice because of its wide, flat shape, but it's a little too lean for this application.
- Tri-tip, though quite inexpensive and nicely marbled, is simply too large. With such a low surface area–to–volume ratio, you get barely any marinade flavor.
- Short ribs was one of my favorite cuts for carne asada (as well as one of my favorites for cooking as a steak), with tons of beef flavor and melt-in-your-mouth fat. The only problem is that they require very thin slicing, which is okay for stuffing tortillas, but not great if you want to serve them to guests in a whole chunk.
- Flap meat, my second choice, has a wide, coarse texture that's custom-made for picking up and clinging to marinades. It is relatively lean, but its juiciness and big flavor make up for that.
- Skirt steak, as suspected, was the clear winner here, with the richest, most buttery flavor, a really nice surface area–to–volume ratio that maximizes the flavor of the marinade, plenty of thin edges to crisp up and char, and, when cooked properly, a melt-in-your-mouth texture.
