On 3/30/2017 at 3:28 AM, jmacnaughtan said:
I disagree. A lot of the skirt you get here is closing in on an inch thick in places, and it's excellent rare. It's one of the few cuts I enjoy blue, mostly because there's so little fat
I've been confused about this for quite some time. In his Food Lab article on making the best carne asada, Kenji Lopez-Alt describes skirt steak as a "long, ribbony piece of meat, with a width of three inches or so and a length of at least a couple of feet." This is what I get 90% of the time when I buy skirt from the market (and what I've gotten %100 of the time when buying it online). But occasionally, supermarket butchers sell "skirt" that "is closing in on an inch thick" in places, and looks a lot more like flank to my eye than skirt. I recently got 2 packages of grassfed skirt from my local Whole Foods (where it was butchered) and one package contained 3 very long, thin strips of what I typically consider "skirt." The other contained a single, thick piece of meat that weighed as much as the other three combined. Everything I've read on skirt online seems to think that skirt steak, both inside and out, is very thin and ribbony -- and nothing close to an inch thick. I suspect that there's a lot of flank steak that is being inadvertently mislabeled.
Either way, either I need a lesson on bovine anatomy, or many butchers do.
In any event, I agree with you that whatever that thick "skirt" steak is, it can be delicious cooked rare.
