For The Best Skirt Steak, You Need Really Intense Heat

Unless you're making fajitas or tacos, skirt steak is rarely given its dues. But the thin, flavorful cut of beef actually makes an excellent main course all on its own. For those nights you're craving steak but don't have an appetite for a rib eye or even a sirloin, skirt steak is perfect. Top it with some lightly grilled onions and fresh guacamole, and you've got a meal that manages to be both light and beefy at the same time. Or serve it with stir-fried cucumber, tomatoes, and red onions for an unexpected change of pace.

Regardless of what you're making it with, the most important part of skirt steak is how you cook it. And that means using the highest heat possible. The thinness of the meat makes its middle prone to overcooking, so you don't want to wait around for the outer part to brown or sear any longer than you have to. For something that is a mere ¼ inch to 1 inch thick (depending on how it's cut), it's remarkably difficult to get a good crust unless you use super-high heat. Anything less, and it'll come off the grill or out of the pan looking almost like it's been boiled — and that's definitely not what you're going for.

A raging hot grill is the ideal method for quickly cooking the outside — which is all a skirt steak needs. But a cast iron pan that's been heated until the oil is smoking works, too. Overcooking skirt steak is the quickest way to ruin it. Doing so will result in tough, chewy beef that's lost its flavor along with the juices that were cooked off. Alternatively, prematurely removing it from a medium heat because the middle is done will result in the aforementioned boiled appearance, where a deep brown is preferable. So be sure to get your grill or pan fiery hot before tossing a skirt steak on.

While medium rare is an acceptable temperature for skirt steak, grilling or searing it to medium will result in moister meat with a much more tender texture. That's because the nature of the cut needs to get a little more done than your average steak for its fibers to loosen up. Of course, with how thin it is and how quickly it cooks, it's not as easy to achieve medium rare in skirt steak anyway. Although it will depend on how thin the steak is, it should only need a few minutes with high heat on each side to reach medium.

As with just about every cut of beef, marinating skirt steak is a great way to tenderize it while locking in an abundance of flavor — but you can also manually tenderize it with a meat mallet. And if you don't feel like marinating it or adding a meat rub afterward, a few splashes of soy sauce and a sprinkling of garlic powder will give that tenderized skirt steak an immense flavor without too much work.

How you cut any steak is also important to ensure that it remains tender and easy to chew. While that always means cutting against the grain, with skirt steak, the grain goes in a different direction than what you expect with other cuts. Instead of cutting across it the short way like you're probably used to, what you want to do is cut along the full length of the steak. This will give you longer strips than you probably want, but the strips can be chopped into smaller pieces from there. By following these simple tips and cooking your skirt steak on a very high heat, you'll be amazed at the taste and tenderness that results.