FAJITAS VERDES | My Cookbook Recipe for Traditional CARNE ASADA MARINADE & How to Cook 'em Perfect!

Who's that dude? Y'all know that dude? I know that guy. I think it's me. In this video we're going to make a delicious traditional marinade for our carne asada aka South Texas barbecue. Today's carne asada is all about fajitas and I'm going to show you how to grill them perfectly. I like to call this my fajitas verdes or green marinade and you're about to see why. This recipe blends cilantro, parsley, oregano, olive oil, lime, lemon, and tomatillo together for a super delicious bite packed with bright and aromatic beefy flavors. Remember we still do want to taste the beef along with the tenderizing and the flavor enhancing from the marinade and that's done with the right measurements of ingredients and the right amount of time in the marinade. We're also going to add a base of ingredients here to round out that familiar flavor and I'm also going to show you one more trick in this video to really layer on and pack the flavor so y'all stay tuned for that. Now let's get fired up and grill some fajitas verdes. Vamonos! Hey friends I have this huge announcement I'm so excited and I'm pumped to share this super big announcement with you guys. My first cookbook is available for pre-order and it launches in the summer of 2025 that's just a couple of months away. I have over a hundred recipes of barbecue carne asada comida casera that means homemade just like you see on this channel and the full recipe for this video you're watching now is in this cookbook and to order all you have to do is click the link in the description of this video and it really helps a lot if you pre-order and you won't miss a chance to get one. So friends thanks again for all the support without you guys this book probably never would have happened. Y'all kept asking me for it and I wanted to do it for a long time so together we have come up with this amazing cookbook so click the link in the description and get you one or three share it with a friend or somebody that likes to cook too. Now back to the fajita verde recipe. Boom! First thing I'm going to do is cut my lemon in half so we're going to squeeze that into this bowl right here. Apparently this is not quite seedless there was one seed in there and that's why I like to do this one first because it's right here at the bottom I'll be able to get those seeds out of there real quick like. Next up we've got a lime you want to try and find some juicy limes. The trick is to find some smooth skin on your limes. If you can get a smooth skin on there you're going to be all right they're going to be nice and juicy just like this one see that nice and juicy. We've got half a cup of orange juice we're going to drop this in here. A quarter cup of pineapple juice. I don't want it to be a real sweet marinade but I do like that little hint of magic that the pineapple juice puts in there. Up next friends is a tablespoon of OG this is salt pepper and garlic and we're going to put a whole heaping tablespoon in there. You want to get your salt and your garlic ingredient in there first so that the salt dissolves and you want that garlic to start flavorizing the liquid as well. We have two tablespoons of rice wine vinegar now you can use apple cider vinegar or regular vinegar. I have this already it's a little more mellow I like that it brings that little tart flavor to the marinade without being too strong. Next up everybody's favorite watch your sister sauce Worcestershire, Worcestershire, Worcestershire, Worcester. I just call it Worcester call it whatever you like. So we're going to use two tablespoons of this super good stuff. One tablespoon of soy sauce and you don't want too much of this but it does add a really great flavor. Every once in a while we're going to give it a little whisk as we continue to add ingredients so we'll give that a little whisk. Now here's the magic ingredient for tenderizing the meat. This is a teaspoon but we're going to use about half of a teaspoon. If I wasn't using lime and lemon juice and the rice wine vinegar I would probably use a whole teaspoon. If you combine all three of them it might be a little too much. We're only going to marinate our meat today for about four hours so those ingredients together will definitely soften up and tenderize those fajitas. One teaspoon of comino which is cumin in ingles and that was a heaping teaspoon by the way. A teaspoon of oregano. This is Mexican oregano. I'm going to measure that out. We're going to put it right here. We're going to give it a little extra flavor. Bring out the bouquet of flavor here. Regular oregano will work. This Mexican oregano is usually a little more flavorful. Whisk it a little bit in between each couple of ingredients. I have my own home ground chile de arbol so I'm going to use about a teaspoon of that right there. That looks like a teaspoon to me. Let's roll. We're going to stir this up. You don't want too much chile de arbol because that sucker's got a bite. We're going to chop up some of these veggies so I'm going to take this tomatillo and it's a fresh not cooked tomatillo and I'm basically going to dice it up. Drop that in here and it takes three of these tomatillos. These also add a little bit more acidity and flavor and a little tartness to the marinade. Okey dokey we're also going to throw in half of an onion. I'm just going to cut this into slices like this and that will do just fine. This is a lot of ingredients in this marinade. Trust me friends it's delicious. We're going to also add two jalapeños in here and we're just going to kind of cut them up add them to the marinade. All right next up is a couple of garlics. Next up friends is the cilantro and we're going to take about half a cup here. By the time you chop it up and press it down it's about half a cup and about a half a cup of parsley. That looks like half a cup to me. These two flavors together along with the tart ingredients that are in this marinade brings an awesome flavor to your fajitas. It really is good on pretty much any cut of beef that you're going to grill. Now if you chop this up really really fine you don't have to blend it but it really is better if you do. All right let's get this all in here. Probably the best thing to do here would have been to put all the ingredients in the blender to begin with right? That's what I normally do. I don't know why I didn't do that today. We're going to use half of a cup of this olive oil. Let's dump that in there. Cool. You want to just give it a couple of pulses. You just want to break everything down a little bit. We just want to chop up the ingredients and make them a little bit smaller a little bit finer. Much better like that. Yep yep yep yep. I have here two and a half pounds of skirt steaks. This is an inside skirt steak. These are the true original fajitas. I'm going to trim these up real quick. Cut it into three. I'm going to cut it into three sections here. Approximately the same length. You want to get some of this membrane off. Mainly just so that the marinade and later on the seasoning can actually flavor the meat. You don't have to trim them completely and get down into the meat and steal some meat off of them. You mainly want this membrane right here. You need a good sharp knife with a little point on it like that. And my saying has always been that a good sharp knife makes the job a lot easier. So that's what we're doing today. You don't have to have 100% of it totally completely off. You just want this membrane right here as much as possible. You want to expose the meat and trust me that marinade is going to do a job either way. But you just want that big excessive fat off of there. A lot of people don't know this but there is a section on the inside skirt steak that is more tender than the rest of it. The way you can tell is by the marbling right there. You can see that marbling. It's intramuscular marbling. Some of the fajitas have like very pronounced stripes like this. I call them tiger stripes. When you buy that cut it's a very tough piece of meat. But when it has marbling like this it's a tender piece of this has marbling. This is going to be my piece. I'm going to give the rest of this to everybody else. I'm just saying. All right friends we're going to pour some of this marinade on the bottom here and we're going to spread it around. Flip this piece on the bottom here. Make sure it gets all that flavor. We're going to put a little bit more in here and add another strip of meat. Put a little bit more in here. Add another strip of meat here and now for the big piece you're going to lay half of this in here like that. Put a little bit of marinade in between. Lay this down like that. Add a little more marinade on top and we're going to reserve some of this for my smoothie in the morning. I'm just kidding. We're going to have something special with that a little bit later so we're going to set that aside. You want to come back about every 30 minutes or maybe at least once an hour. Flip these meats around. Toss them around. Make sure the marinade gets on every side of these fajitas. But for now we're going to take them over to the refrigerator. Let them chill out for about four hours. Let that marinade do its magic. Let's get fired up and cook some fajitas All righty now let's get this fire under control over here. We're going to do most of the grill with this charcoal. I'm going to spread it out nice and even. We definitely don't need a dual zone setup today. We're cooking fajitas. They are best cooked straight over the fire. Let's get this grill nice and clean with a little cebolla. Oh look at that. Look at that. Look at that. Why do we use an onion to clean the grill? Number one it does a great job cleaning. You can see that it gets all the soot off of the grill. That is not seasoning. That is not flavor friends. That is soot. The other thing is that it smells amazing. It does add a subtle flavor to your meat. There we go. Now we're going to lay it over here on the side. You can't cook fajitas in South Texas without a little bit of mesquite flavor in there. It is the best flavor for fajitas. So we're going to throw a couple of these chunks in here and start cooking. Okay amigos let's get the first piece of meat on there. Here we go right over the fire. Oh that's music to my ears. We're not even taking the marinade or seasoning off at all. We're just going to drop them in there right over the fire my friends. Now one of the things about marinated meats, particularly fajitas, there's a lot of moisture there. So you want to leave your lid off. Let that fire stay hot because the moisture is going to try to kill your fire and your eyeballs too. I'm just saying. I did forget to season them. I usually always put a little seasoning on here. So let's put a little wow on these fajitas. Time to flippity flipper. Let's go baby. Look at that. That is charred and a lickety split as they say. We got some heat baby. Yeah buddy it ain't gonna take long for these to get done. Y'all remember the marinade we made earlier? We're gonna put some right on this fire here. We're gonna heat it up and we're gonna use it as a basting sauce. We're gonna flip these a couple more times and we will be done. I mean done done. So we have a lot of fire going on here because we have some fajitas that had a lot of olive oil on them. Their moisture is staying in the meat. It's going back and forth each time we flip them. And so we're gonna go ahead and close this up. Tame the fire down a little bit. Let that butter melt. Oh baby looking good. It's been a couple of minutes. Time to flippity flip. How often should you flip? That really depends on a couple of things. Number one, how hot your fire is. Number two, how close is your meat to the fire. Number three, how thick is your meat. If it's a real thick piece of meat, you're gonna flip a bunch more times. Now you can flip every 30 seconds, every minute, every two minutes. Really depends on how hot your fire is. Let's check it one more time. Check this out. Y'all see that moisture right there? When that moisture starts to come up to the top of the meat, you really should have flipped about 30 seconds ago. Because that moisture is going to evaporate and be gone with the wind. What you really want to do is keep it inside your meat. That heat pushes the moisture up. You want to flip it before it evaporates. So flip flip, flippity flip. And I'm going to stir this marinade here. That butter is melting really quick. And that's what we want. We're going to baste the meat with some of this right here. It really adds a lot more flavor friends. And these fajitas are done. So I'm going to slide them over this way. Get them from the direct heat. This one's a lot thinner. So I'm going to get it way over here too. We're going to give them a couple more minutes and let that baste add extra flavor to the meat. And then we're going to flip them one more time. Check the temperature. Make sure we don't overcook them. And then we're going to go ahead and pull them out. Let's see what these green fajitas look like right now. They still have a lot of marinade up there on top, but we don't want to lose our moisture. So we're going to flip them one last time. And I'm going to baste them just a little bit more here for extra flavor. All right I'll be back in about a minute friends to get them out. They are ready to go. I can tell just by looking at them. I always say you need perfection. Get a good meat thermometer. Let's see where we're at. But let's check the fat one. 136. We are ready to go. Yeah buddy. All right let's get them out of here right now. I'm going to put them right here on this little plate. Our fajitas are done. That took a whole seven or eight minutes. That was it. We're done. I can't wait to take a bite of these. They look amazing. The fajitas verdes have been resting for about five minutes. It's time to cut. So let's get these sliced up. Oh that's soft. Really soft. Check that out. Oh baby. These are going to be good. I can feel the texture's nice and soft. All right let's get a tortilla on the cutting board here. Get a couple of slices. But before we eat the taco let's give it a taste test. Yeah yeah that's it. Let's get this salsa here and put a little bit on our taco. The fajitas are really good by themselves. That salsa has got to make them even better. Let's see what we got. Cheers my friends. Soft. Tender. Super flavorful. I could eat that. There's good and there's damn good. These are damn good. The marinade did what it was supposed to do. It added a ton of flavor. Y'all need to try this out. These are really really good. Incredibly delicious. Super moist. Super good. Friend I know you're going to love it. It's just fantastic. Hope you guys enjoyed the video. I certainly always have fun when I'm cooking for y'all. If you like the video, share it. Thank you guys. If you guys are interested in our American Pitmaster company rubs, pitmaster.us. Keep the smoke light. Make it work. Boom. These are good.