Dateline: May 25, 2020. An Experiment that follows smoking burgers

After yesterday's epic success with the smoked burgers, I decided to try to see if the same success could be had with smoking steak.  I had 4 thin sirloin steaks from FreshDirect.  Why not experiment on these?  Grilling them would be a crap shoot and I can't remember why I ordered them in the first place!

I used the website Hey Grill, Hey as my jumping off point.  I prefer my steaks medium rare, so cooking to 140° F or more was not in the cards.  I felt that I could get the temp right with a couple of probes attached to my Smoke Temperature Control Center.  I had one probe at grill level and one in the smallest steak. 

When I had thin, what I really meant was also tiny.  These steaks were .3 and .4 of a pound, about 5 and 7 ounces.  Maybe 1/2 inch thick, maybe if they were wearing an overcoat. 

torched steak

watermelon salad

In contemplating what to do with the steak, I thought immediately of the burger rub from yesterday, but decided that I wanted to taste the steak, not the rub tonight.  So I went with salt, pepper, onion powder, and garlic powder on an oiled steak.  Season both sides, please.

Based on the timings from Hey Grill, Hey, I figured about 30 minutes at 220° F.  It actually took about 40 minutes.  Ok, the steaks came off the grill at 130° F and I brought them inside and used my propane torch on them to brown and crisp them up.  The photo appears incinerated, but they were nicely brown.  They then went into a 120° oven to hold until dinner was served.

To accompany the steaks, I prepped earlier in the afternoon a salad of watermelon cubes, thinly sliced sweet onions, thinly sliced cucumbers, thinly sliced celery and halved cherry tomatoes on the vine.

Just before sitting down to eat, I dressed it with sherry vinegar and a good olive oil and crumbled about 3 oz. of feta cheese into the salad before tossing.

My thoughts:  the steak was very beefy, relatively tender, cooked perfectly, but left me kind of cold on the idea going forward.  I think that the biggest issue was the thinness of the steaks and the lack of intramuscular fat.  Next time I will try either a rib eye or a strip steak. 

perfect medium rare

The flavor was good, the tenderness was ok, not buttery like tenderloin, but pleasantly firm to the bite.  What came through was the beef flavor and the smoke.  I tried cutting my piece like a London Broil, (diagonal slices, against the grain) but it did not make it any tenderer.  Bill cut his up into small squares and happily ate them.  I do concur on the tiny square system of portioning the meat.

The salad was a perfect go with, juicy and satisfying, along with a bit of dessert as well.

Will I try this experiment again?  Yes, as mentioned earlier, with a fattier steak.  Conceptually, this should have been like the burgers, but because the steaks were only in the smoker for 40 minutes, there was not enough smokey flavor development.