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Hi, I'm Chef Scott Samuel here at The Culinary Institute of America at Greystone in the Napa Valley.
Today I'm going to show you how to make a spicy Asian beef salad with grapes and Napa Cabbage.
Let's take a look at our ingredients.
I'm using Napa Cabbage because of the crunch of it.
I'm using black grapes for the color and the bite and the sweetness of it.
I'm using scallions, chopped red peppers for color and crunch,
cilantro and toasted peanuts....
And then I'm going ahead — go ahead and make a marinade for my flank steak.
So, it's gonna be a spicy marinade. I'm incorporating serranos, some mint, some shallot,
some sesame oil, honey, lime juice, a little bit of fish sauce, and sugar...
So, I'll bring this together in a marinade, and marinate the beef for about two to three hours.
And the last component will be my Shoyu vinaigrette — or a soy sauce vinaigrette.
I'm using the base of soy sauce with complementary flavors of garlic, sesame seeds,
some honey, some sugar, a little bit of canola oil, rice wine vinegar and fish sauce.
I'll also incorporate some ginger — which I'm going to show you how to mince, and that will be the vinaigrette.
So, a couple things that can be had done ahead of time, and then when we're ready to serve this....
Let's say we're serving it for lunch; I'll go ahead and toss the cabbage salad with our shoyu vinaigrette,
and that should hold for three or four hours.
And when I serve it, I'm going to serve it with a slice of chilled spicy beef on top.
So, the first thing I want to do is make a marinade for the beef.
So, I'm going to start with the... some of my liquid ingredients. We're going to go with our fish sauce.
We're going to go with our honey,
and this will help when we're grilling in the caramelization of the beef....
.....and gonna go with our sesame oil, sugar,
lime juice,
and I've taken serranos and I've stemmed them and chopped them with the seeds...
And the other component that I want to put in here will be shallot rings.
So, I just wanted to do a quick peel of the shallot, cutting these into rings......
And then I'm going to go ahead and add my flank steak that I've trimmed a little bit, taking the fat off....
And I'm going to go ahead and marinate this for one to two hours, to kind of
break down the meat/incorporate the flavors.
I've done this at a time for the sake of this. And what I want to do is I have a preheated grill....
And I'm going to grill this till it's medium rare.
[sizzling sounds]
So, I've got some nice grill marks on this. I'm going to finish this in an oven
for about 10 minutes until it's a medium-rare, then we'll bring it out and rest it.
Alright. so while our beef is cooking, let's go to make the cabbage salad with the grapes
and our soy sauce vinaigrette.
So, we have our ingredients for the shoyu vinaigrette.
We're going to go with our soy sauce....
the sesame oil,
our canola oil,
rice wine vinegar,
lime juice....
So, lots of ingredients but they all have a reason.
It needs to have a nice bite of saltiness and sweetness,
and our honey,
sugar,
minced garlic,
and our Dijon.
So, the last thing I want to put in here will be some fresh ginger. But I want to
do a little demonstration on making this.
Okay, so if we're going to incorporate ginger, I just wanted to do a simple demonstration,
so that you can see the easiest way to mince ginger. Taking the back of a spoon to peel it....
Most of the flavor is right under the skin, so I didn't want to peel too much.
And then I can go ahead and slice this......
......as thin as possible into little planks.
And then I'm cutting cutting with the grain of the ginger.
I'm only — for this small recipe — getting about a teaspoon of this ginger.
So, once I've done these little sticks, and they come across it.... and mince it.
So, it's a whole lot easier than trying to chop a big chunk of ginger,
but it's best to incorporate this fresh component to the dressing.
All right, there's our soy sauce vinaigrette. We can make this ahead of time.
And now let's go ahead and work with the cabbage and grape salad.
So, for the napa cabbage.....
Easiest way to do this is cut it down the middle.
And I'm going to do a simple technique called "Chiffonade...."
And that's basically just cutting it into thin strips.
Yeah, I'm going to get about four cups for this recipe.
And I want to go all the way down near the stem, because this is a nice crunchy part of the cabbage.
[Chopping sounds]
Alright, so our cabbage....
I've done the pepper ahead of time.
Some sliced red pepper....
And I'm just going with cilantro leaves,
chopped scallions,
and toasted peanuts....
And I'm using the black grapes that have been cut in half.
This is going to add the cool component that will cut the spice of the beef.
And now I'm going to add just enough of the soy sauce vinaigrette to coat.
And then once our beef is done, we can prepare it one of two ways:
I can slice the beef and fold it into the salad
or I can serve the salad with a slice of beef on top.
All right, so this is a ready to go. I'm going to go ahead and refrigerate this. Let the flavors marinate.
All right, so this looks nice. We're going to go ahead and rest this.
And then slice it, and chill it.
The beef has had a chance to rest and that helps the juices come back to the center,
and our salad has a dressing on it, so....
We want to kind of put this together as a plate.
So, with the flank steak, I want to cut against the grain.....
....so that it's easier to eat.
And you can kind of see the grain running this way, so I'm cutting it against it at an angle.
And it looks like it's done just right: medium-rare.
Had a chance to rest to fully cook evenly.
And then I've set some of the marinade from the beginning aside,
without having any of the beef in it and....
This is what I would do ahead of time,
and chill this completely....
....For putting this together as a composed salad.
So, here's our cabbage and grape salad....
....with our shoyu vinaigrette.
Topped with our flank steak.
And let's just garnish a little bit with some more of our black grapes.
And there you have it.
The Spicy Asian Beef Salad with Grapes and Napa Cabbage.
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