But today I thought I'd ease myself back into the foodie swing with something easy, something quick.
Top sirloin is a cheap cut of beef, as far as the local Vons is concerned. Well, it's not blade steak, or a round roast, but it's certainly more affordable than eye-round or strip loin or T-bone or even the California specialty tri-tip.
Usually sirloin steaks come in thick pieces like the following:
From there, there's a number of things you could do: go for a large dice to make a stew; cut it down to strips for stir-fry; maybe even roast it whole. Today, none of those are what I'm going for. This is more of a how-to for one of my favorite diner breakfasts: Chicken Fried Steak.
From this spot, using the knife, cut the thick piece in half longways, giving you two of the same trapazoidal shape, but each half as thick:
Now things get simpler than you may think. Here you can use plastic bags, like I have in the following pictures, or you can use plastic wrap layered a few times. The basic idea is that you want the meat covered because you're going to be pounding it down, an action that takes patience, time, and elbow grease. Start with:
And eventually you'll be left with this great big sheet of beef:
The idea is to pound it down to between a half-inch and a quarter-inch thick. After getting the meat like this, bread it with the tri-wash of flour, egg, and seasoned bread crumbs and you're ready for deep-fry or pan-fry or even oven bake.
Quick note: When the pounded meat is as thin as a quarter-inch, what you have is the German dish schnitzel. They deep fry their schnitzel, which is what makes it so great. The half-inch pound is what you tend to see in diners for chicken fried steak.
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