Summer Entertaining: Grilled Pepper Steak With Salad
Posted by bellastraniera - 20/07/09 at 11:07 am
Everybody needs a few go-to recipes for summer entertaining. We adapted this one for Pepper Steak with Salad from Bon Appetit to make it super simple for a casual dinner with friends.
Perfect for summer house guests wanting to repay their hosts, it’s low impact on the kitchen, requires little equipment other than a grill, and calls for ingredients available nearly everywhere. Most importantly, the recipe has been tweaked so that all the prep work can be done well in advance – allowing plenty of time for cocktail hour.
Recipe: Grilled Pepper Steak With Salad
4 large garlic cloves, pressed
3 tsp. coarsely ground black pepper
2 ½ tsp. sea salt
2 1 ½-inch thick steaks of your liking – rib eye, New York strip, etc.
1 c. cored, seeded, and diced tomatoes
4 large handfuls mesclun or baby greens mix
½ c. diced red onion (or whatever onion you have on hand)
½ c. diced bell pepper, any color
½ c. crumbled feta cheese
3 tbsp. chopped pitted Kalamata olives (or whatever good olives you have on hand)
½ jalapeno, seeded and finely chopped
extra-virgin olive oil
½ lemon
Mix the garlic, pepper and salt in a bowl and smear the mixture all over the steaks. Allow the steaks to sit for at least 1 hour at room temperature. (You can also prepare steaks up to 6 hours in advance – just refrigerate the steak, bringing it to room temperature before grilling.)
Prepare all the vegetables up to 4 hours in advance and layer them, tomatoes first, remaining ingredients following, in a medium bowl. Cover with a damp paper towel and refrigerate.
When you’re ready to eat, preheat the grill to an extremely high temperature – 550 degrees or higher on a large gas grill. Place the steaks on the grill and cover. Cook 3-4 minutes per side on a large grill, 5-6 minutes per side on a small portable grill (like a Weber Q) until steak is medium rare. (Rare meat feels spongy and squishy when pressed with a spatula or a pair of tongs; medium rare feels like the pad of your palm.)
Remove the steaks and let them rest for 10 minutes. Uncover the salad and drizzle about 2 tbsp. of extra-virgin olive oil on top, then squeeze half a lemon over that. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and toss.
Thinly slice the steaks against the grain. Layer the steak on one side of a large platter, sprinkle lightly with sea salt, and arrange the salad on the other side of the platter. Let guests serve themselves.
Serves 6.
Changes to the Bon Appetit recipe: We used two good steaks instead of one top sirloin steak. Life is too short for sub-par cuts of steak. Alternately, just use whatever steak you have on hand. The grilling instructions differ, adhering instead to the high-heat guidelines of many great steak chefs. For the vegetables, the salad was prepped in advance – everything but the tossing. Tomatoes were seeded so that they would leak less moisture in the fridge. Bell pepper was substituted for part of the jalapeno, since it just adds more variety, and you may have a bell pepper on hand anyway. Note: the salad is also excellent on its own as a starter course.
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bellastraniera
a.k.a. Marcy Swingle - obsessed with food and fashion.
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