Cooking meat in the middle east is simple, we either grill it (kebobs, tikka, kufta) or we stew it (different parts of the animal - shoulder, stewing meats, heads, feet...whatever)
And then there are a million things to do with minced meat of various fat contents -like fillings for all kinds of kubbas and stuffings.. it's very versatile as my mother says.
This is the sort of thing I'm familiar with, and then on top of that I used to be a vegetarian for all my teen years so I pretty much missed out on learning how to cook meats.
Now that I eat meat again I've began exploring the world of western meat cooking methods like steaks and burgers. There is nothing like a good steak I think, and with all the cuts I try to keep it simple to let the true flavour of the meat shine.
Most of the people I know wouldn't go near a piece of meat cooked anything less than well done - the occasional "done" tikka is ok but we really like to over cook our meat.
At our family BBQ last summer everyone other than my brave 'foodie' mother could not stomach the thought of eating a perfectly cooked medium lamb chop so we had to re-bake the already BBQed chops.
Ohh well! :)
The other day I came upon a giant sirloin roast (top or bottom? Cant' remember what the package was labelled as but it was reasonably priced) I had froze them both until I did some research on what to do with them.
The first one I had totally ruined, thinking that it was a good cut for braising/stewing I removed all the good pieces of meat (took a good 30 mins !) and then browned and braised it in my big pot and the end result was a really dry texture, nothing like stewing meat at all.
The next day I thawed out the next piece, I was determined to make things right so this time I dried the meat and rubbed it with a good helping of dijon mustard then sprinkled it with BBQ spice blend (salt in the mix was good, though I added a 1/4 cup of brown sugar to it) and then rubbed that all over the meat.
Once it came to room temp and marinated well I fired up the BBQ grill and seared up the huge piece of meat until nice and brown on all sides. Now I put the grill on low and covered the top part loosely with a piece of foil and left the lid of the BBQ open.
This cooked for about 45 mins, turning half way through and making sure it did not burn from time to time. The smell in the neighbourhood was heavenly and that crust with the brown sugar and spice rub looked so delicious!
I was hoping at this point that things were ok inside the meat and that it turned out edible, so I removed it and let it rest on a tray tented (using a foil tent to let all the juices distribute)
When it was time to eat I sliced into it and to my surprise it was perfect!!! Yay!
Just the way I like my meat, medium. Mmmm!
The bottom shots are of the first day it was grilled, and the sandwiches were made with cold leftovers, it went a long way and was really good with that flavourful sweet crust, even the juices dripping off and collecting in the pan were so yummy!
Give it a try, it's like BBQ roast beef (I have yet to learn how to make a good oven/slow cooker roast beef) and leftovers are amazing.
