How To Make Carne Asada Marinade

Carne asada lives or dies on two decisions made before the meat ever sees fire: the cut, and how long it sits in citrus. Skirt or flank, both are thin, both are grainy, both take a marinade fast and both go tough if you overcook them by ninety seconds. The marinade itself is lime, orange, garlic, cilantro, and enough oil to carry it, and it does not need soy sauce or beer to work.

Equipment

You are juicing a lot of citrus and chopping a lot of cilantro, so the two things that matter are a sharp knife and a bowl wide enough to lay the steak flat. I use the Handmade Damascus Kitchen Knives with Leather Roll for the herbs and the Large Capacity Stainless Steel Mixing Bowl with Scale to whisk the marinade before the meat goes in. A stainless steel whisk emulsifies the oil into the citrus properly, which matters more than it sounds, an unemulsified marinade sits in two layers and seasons unevenly. For the grill, a foldable charcoal grill gets hotter than most gas setups, which is what this cut wants.

Ingredients

2 pounds skirt or flank steak
1/2 cup fresh lime juice, about 4 limes
1/2 cup fresh orange juice, about 1 large orange
1/3 cup neutral oil
1 cup fresh cilantro, roughly chopped, stems included
6 garlic cloves, minced
1 jalapeño, seeded and minced
2 teaspoons ground cumin
1 teaspoon chili powder
1 teaspoon dried Mexican oregano
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 teaspoon black pepper, freshly ground

Ingredient Selection

Fresh citrus, not bottled. Bottled lime juice is pasteurized and tastes cooked, and in a marinade this simple there is nowhere for it to hide. The orange is doing a specific job, its sugar balances the lime's sharpness and helps the surface caramelize on the grill, so do not skip it and do not swap it for more lime. Mexican oregano is not the same plant as Mediterranean oregano; it is more citrusy and less minty, and it is worth buying the right one. Use cilantro stems as well as leaves, the stems carry more flavor than the leaves do.

Method

Mise en Place

Juice the citrus: Roll the limes and orange firmly on the counter before cutting, it breaks the interior membranes and yields noticeably more juice.
Prep the aromatics: Mince the garlic and jalapeño, roughly chop the cilantro.

Build the Marinade

Combine the liquids: Whisk the lime juice, orange juice, and oil together in the mixing bowl until it emulsifies and looks slightly cloudy.
Add the aromatics and spices: Stir in the cilantro, garlic, jalapeño, cumin, chili powder, oregano, salt, and pepper.

Marinate

Reserve first: Set aside 1/4 cup of the marinade in a separate covered container before the meat goes anywhere near it. This is your finishing sauce, and reserving it now is the only safe way to have one.
Coat the steak: Lay the steak flat in the remaining marinade, turning to coat both sides. Cover and refrigerate.

How to Marinate

This is the step people get wrong, and they get it wrong by being generous with time. Lime juice is aggressive, and skirt and flank are thin. Past a certain point the acid denatures the surface proteins so far that the exterior goes chalky and grey and the texture turns mealy on the grill.

Skirt or flank steak: 2 to 6 hours. Do not exceed 8.
Thicker cuts like flap meat or sirloin: 4 to 12 hours.
Chicken thighs, if using this on poultry: 2 to 24 hours.
Shrimp: 15 to 30 minutes, maximum.

Always in the refrigerator, and in glass or plastic rather than metal, since Utah State University Extension notes that acidic marinades react with metal containers.

Serving and Application

Get the grill as hot as it will go. Pat the steak dry before it hits the grate, wet meat steams instead of searing. Skirt steak wants roughly 3 to 4 minutes per side for medium-rare, flank a little longer. Pull it at 130°F to 135°F and rest it a full 10 minutes.

Then slice it against the grain, thinly. This is not a stylistic note. Skirt and flank have long, visible muscle fibers, and slicing with the grain leaves those fibers full length and the meat genuinely difficult to chew. Find the direction the lines run and cut perpendicular to them.

Spoon the reserved marinade over the sliced meat. Serve with warm tortillas, onion, cilantro, and lime.

Popular Variations

With beer: Replacing the orange juice with a light Mexican lager is common in northern Mexico and gives a maltier, less sweet result.
Chipotle version: Two chipotles in adobo, blended in, adds smoke and a deeper red color.
Soy-spiked: A tablespoon of soy sauce is not traditional but adds glutamate and helps browning, a common restaurant shortcut.

Make Ahead, Storage and Food Safety

The marinade itself keeps 3 days refrigerated before use, though the cilantro dulls after the first day. Once it has touched raw beef, it is not a sauce. University of Illinois Extension is clear that used marinade must be brought to a rolling boil before it can be brushed on cooked meat, and that plastic bags used for raw meat should be discarded rather than washed and reused.

History

Carne asada means simply "grilled meat," and the dish belongs to the ranching culture of northern Mexico, particularly Sonora and the border states, where beef is plentiful and thin cuts cooked fast over mesquite are the norm. The citrus-forward marinade familiar in the United States owes a good deal to Mexican-American cooking in California and Texas, where lime and orange were cheap and abundant. In much of northern Mexico the meat is seasoned far more simply, often with little more than salt, and the marinade is the exception rather than the rule.

References

Related Guides

The classic sauce spooned over this same piece of grilled beef is Chimichurri, and the whole-table version of the meal is Brazilian Mixed Grill (Churrasco Misto). If you want to understand which cuts you are actually buying and why skirt behaves the way it does, How to Butcher a Cow walks the whole animal.