Southwestern Steak Tips

Back to All Recipes.
(Beef Serves: 4 Prep Time: 120 minutes)
Found in CI May/June 03, page 19

Shopping List

  • 1.5 - 2 lb steak tips

Staples Used

  • 1/3 cup Soy sauce
  • 1/3 cup vegetable oil
  • 6 or so cloves garlic, minced through garlic press
  • 1 Tbl chili powder
  • 2 tsp ground cumin
  • 1/2 tsp cayenne
  • 1 Tbl dark brown sugar
  • 1 Tbl tomato paste (Amore in the tube)

Recipe

Put the beef into a gallon-sized Ziploc. Mix everything else in a measuring cup, and pour over the beef. Seal the Ziploc, squish to make sure it is all covering the beef, and refrigerate 45 - 120 minutes to marinate.
Heat the grill to high. Take the beef out of the bag with long tongs and grill, about 8 minutes total, 4 per side.
While the beef is grilling, pour the remaining marinade from the bag into a small pot and boil for a couple of minutes on the stove. The resulting thick sauce can then be dabbed onto the meat for extra flavor and salt.

Notes

The above is only slightly tweaked from the Cooks Illustrated original; it is fully-transcribed here mainly because I use this one so much that it's broken the spine of the volume and the pages are falling out.
This is a whole-family favorite. At Christmas one year, we decided that we wanted beef for dinner, and Dad and I wound up arguing about who would make it, each of us saying that we had the best beef recipe around. After ten minutes of this, we realized that we were talking about the same CI recipe.
Uses: Grill
Goes With: Works quite well served on top of salad in the summer.
Justin du Coeur (jducoeur) -- Southwestern Steak Tips:Review
--

Variations

Asian-inflected Sirloin Tips

The CI source also has an Asian-inflected version, which:
  • Replaces half the vegetable oil with toasted sesame oil
  • Omits the tomato paste, chili, cumin and cayenna
  • Doubles the brown sugar
  • Adds a Tbl of grated ginger, 2 tsp orange zest, 1/2 tsp red pepper flakes, and a minced scallion
--