Chicken Grill-Fried Steak

[bigabyte]

I had thawed out a KC Strip for lunch today, but I also wanted to enter the Ground Meat Throwdown. I knew it would seem just ridiculous to make a hamburger out of a KC Strip, so I put my thinking cap on for a bit. Then I took it off because it hurt.

Oh, one other thing....I had a couple of minor problems come up while preparing this. The first of which is my good camera might just be on the fritz! It turned on, and just when I went to snap the first pic it went dead. So i had to resort to my backup crappy camera.

So here's the KC Strip...


And here it is cubed...


And here it is after running it through a coarse grind...


I took the meat and mixed in my normal steak seasonings because, well, I really like it a lot. I then put the meat in the fridge while I started up a chimney full of lump.

While the chimney was firing up, I took a Russet Potato...


Sliced it in half and removed a dark spot...


Then I wrapped them in some foil to keep the liberals from turning them into tofu...


I dumped my chimney of lump into my 22 inch Weber kettle...


And arranged the coals to cook offset...


Then I let the grate get good an hot on both ends, gave them a solid scraping and brushing, and then brushed them with some oil...


Then I put the potatoes on like so, put the lid on and went back inside to work on the meat...


I started to get a breading station set up with flour, egg and cracker crumbs, and this is when I ran into my second problem of the day...someone took my last 2 eggs! They were there this morning! Why did someone decide to make eggs today without consulting me first?

So here I was without eggs, and things already in motion. I quickly tried to think of some good egg alternatives and then shrugged it off. I didn't have time to keep thinking, only to screw things up. So, I went with just the cracker crumbs.

I formed two little steak-ey shaped sorta things with the meat, and pressed them into some cracker crumbs a few times to get a good layer of cracker crumbs on the outside, and even mixed in a touch with the outer meat, like so...


Once the potatoes had been on for 20 minutes, I hit the steak-ey shaped things with a bit of spray-Olive Oil to help crisp up the cracker coating on the steak-ey bits. I put them on the grill and flipped and rotated the potatoes like so...


Then I went inside to make up some gravy.

After 10 minutes I flipped the steak-ey things like so...


At this point my potatoes were soft so I took them inside to make Mashed Potatoes with them. After another 10 minutes I flipped the steak-ey things directly over the coals to finish them up and give the breading a little more brown color...


After about 90 seconds I flipped them again to brown the other side...


After I pulled the steak-ey things off the grill I put on some Green Beans (I forgot to take a pic of those, sorry).

And here it is all ready to eat.


It was fan-farking-tastic! I do think the breading could have been a bit more crispy, but the taste was just absolutely perfect in my opinion. I'm ready to try this again once I have some eggs.

Thanks for looking.

[Homebrewed Q]

Looks good to me! CFS on the grill, gotta try that. Thanks for the pics.

[bluetang]

Flippin' good looking steaks!

[deguerre]

And people gave me heck for cubing and marinading a rib eye. Harrumph.
Still though, nice application for chicken fried! Stick it on a bun and you've got a chicken fried burger. Don't tell Smokey Al though...

[Gore]

Cool! That looks great. What temp did you go with? Maybe crank it up higher to increase the crisp.

Normally I'd cry to see you grinding that steak up, but it was already frozen....

[BBQ Grail]

Originally Posted by deguerre

And people gave me heck for cubing and marinading a rib eye. Harrumph.

Quit your whinning Ribeye Murderer!


Chris that's awesome.

[cowgirl]

Chris that looks fantastic! Bet it was melt-in-your-mouth good!

[Ron_L]

Originally Posted by bigabyte

I formed two little steak-ey shaped sorta things with the meat

You KNOW that it drives me crazy when you talk all technical-like thingy...

[bigabyte]

Originally Posted by deguerre

And people gave me heck for cubing and marinading a rib eye. Harrumph.
Still though, nice application for chicken fried! Stick it on a bun and you've got a chicken fried burger. Don't tell Smokey Al though...

Actually....my first thought was to take the ground steak and form it back into it's original shape, and wrap around the edge with some bacon to give the appearance of the strip of fat along the edge of a KC Strip, and just cook up a "reformed" KC Strip steak. But then I thought better of it. Like you said, this application is dual purpose, it can be Chicken Fried Steak, or it can be a Burger. I like it when things can be used for multiple purposes.

Originally Posted by Gore

Cool! That looks great. What temp did you go with? Maybe crank it up higher to increase the crisp.

Normally I'd cry to see you grinding that steak up, but it was already frozen....

I originally wanted to use your Chicken Batter...but when I saw the cook times I decided to go with cracker crumbs instead. I think either higher heat, or maybe less time offset and more time on direct heat would help. It may also help if I had farking EGGS to get the crackers separate from the meat! Farking eggs!

Originally Posted by Ron_L

You KNOW that it drives me crazy when you talk all technical-like thingy...

I suppose I should have gone into greater detail on the potatoes then. It's important to get them to the right mushy level, and the process of smooshing and adding bits and smidges of this and that can really get rather involved. I just didn't think anyone wanted to read all that, guess I was wrong.

[kwas68]

Forgive the noob and his ignorance.
So what was the point of grinding the steak? Purely for Throwdown reasons? Could the steak been breaded without grinding it up?
Just curious.

[bigabyte]

Originally Posted by kwas68

Forgive the noob and his ignorance.
So what was the point of grinding the steak? Purely for Throwdown reasons? Could the steak been breaded without grinding it up?
Just curious.

Well, I created this for the Throwdown, but grinding may still be a good option even outside of the Throwdown. If you just breaded a KC Strip, it might not be as tender as you normally expect a Chicken Fried Steak to be. In my opinion, you should not need a knife to eat a Chicken Fried Steak. In this case, grinding it allows this. Now, you could tenderize it with other means, like the traditional pounding, but with pounding the meat would get pretty thin and you would probably overcook the steak to brown the breading. A jaccard might work.

[Gore]

Originally Posted by bigabyte

I originally wanted to use your Chicken Batter...but when I saw the cook times I decided to go with cracker crumbs instead. I think either higher heat, or maybe less time offset and more time on direct heat would help. It may also help if I had farking EGGS to get the crackers separate from the meat! Farking eggs!

When I first saw what you were doing, I thought "Uh oh!" One of the experiments I did was with pork. The problem was that the juice is runny and leaks through the batter making it soggy -- you know, the runny, red soggy, gross spots that you might expect. I didn't do any more experimenting with pork or beef. I wanted to avoid cracker or bread crumbs as this is another form of crutch -- nothing against it, but it was not what I was going for. When I saw that is what you did, I breathed a sigh of relief. I'm not saying you can't do it with batter, but I would crank the heat up to 450*-500*. I don't know if that would work, but it is what I would do next. It'd also be a faster cook obviously.

[BBQ Grail]

Originally Posted by kwas68

Forgive the noob and his ignorance.

Trust me! This will not be the last time you wonder what Chris is doing and why. It has nothing to do with being new to the forum.

[SmokinAussie]

WHat spice mic did you season with... not another secret is it???

[bigabyte]

Originally Posted by SmokinAussie

WHat spice mic did you season with... not another secret is it???

Lawry's Seasoned Salt, Plowboy's Bovine Bold, Durkee 6-Pepper Blend, Canadian Steak Seasoning.