Give Fajitas, a Tex-Mex Classic, the Treatment They Deserve


By MARTHA ROSE SHULMANMAY 5, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/11/dining/fajitas-recipe.html?hpw&rref=food&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well



Why is it so hard to find good fajitas?



That’s a question I found myself asking recently as I went on a fajitas crawl in Los Angeles, where I live, to check in on that essential and once fashionable Tex-Mex dish. The sizzling platters that arrived at my table never varied; they came bearing the requisite grilled strips of skirt steak, chicken or shrimp, usually overcooked, with seared onions and peppers that were greasy and underseasoned. Alongside were the predictable bowls of grated yellow cheddar cheese, sour cream, guacamole and salsa.

They were a far cry from the fajitas I used to eat at backyard barbecues with Mexican-American families in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, where I lived and worked in the 1970s.

My friends would grill cumin- and chile-rubbed skirt steak, at that time a cheap cut of meat, slice it thin and serve it on irresistible, freshly made flour tortillas. They would cook onions and chiles, sweet peppers and sometimes corn on the same grill until the vegetables were nicely charred, and serve them along with the meat on the warm tortillas, with grated cheddar and crumbled queso fresco, fresh tomato salsa and homemade guacamole that they mashed in the molcajetes — mortar and pestles made from volcanic rock — that we routinely brought back from Mexico when we went across the border to shop.

They called the grilled strips of beef and the popular tacos they made with them fajitas (faja means strip or belt in Spanish). A few Tex-Mex restaurants in the Valley also served fajitas, but the dish was local, far from mainstream.


Fajitas had been around on both sides of the border for as long as ranchers in South and West Texas had been using immigrant Mexican labor during roundups. The ranchers partly paid their cowboys with cheap parts of the steer — heads, entrails and trimmings, which included skirt and flank steaks. With the heads, the workers made barbacoa de cabeza (barbecued cow’s head), and with the entrails, they made menudo (tripe stew). The skirt steaks were the most desirable. They grilled them over the camp fire, sometimes tenderizing them first in a lime marinade, and ate them in warm flour tortillas.

The dish became known elsewhere in Texas during the course of the 1970s as a diaspora of restaurateurs who had roots in the Rio Grande Valley began to put them on their menus. An enterprising Austin butcher named Sonny Falcon, in an effort to increase his skirt steak sales, created wildly popular Fajita King concessions at rodeos, fairs and festivals all over the state. They were called Tacos a la Ninfa at Ninfa Rodriguez Laurenzo’s successful Houston restaurant, Ninfa’s.

But the real fajita breakthrough, according to the Austin Chronicle food writer Virginia B. Wood, came in 1982, when a German-born chef, George Weidmann, put Sizzling Fajitas on his menu at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Austin. The restaurant quickly became the most profitable in the Hyatt chain, and fajitas became a nationwide phenomenon.

In turn, the price of skirt steak skyrocketed. My local butcher sells it today for $18.49 a pound.

You would think that there would have been a fair amount of fajita innovation over these last 30 years, but except for the dish opening itself up to chicken and shrimp, there hasn’t, at least not that I saw.

I decided to head into my kitchen and change things up. I wasn’t interested in altering the dish in any profound way, but I did want my versions to have more flavor and less grease than restaurant fajitas. I stuck to steak, chicken and shrimp, and I bumped up their flavor with a rub for the beef (chile powder, cumin, salt), chipotle adobo for the chicken and shrimp, and a citrusy marinade and lots of cilantro for all.

The accompanying vegetables are now on an equal footing with the proteins. I sear a generous mix of peppers and onions and season them with fresh green chiles, garlic and cumin. When they’re just about ready to come off the heat, I add a few tablespoons of the marinade mix, held back from the meat or shrimp, which flavors the vegetables and deglazes the pan. I added zucchini and corn to the onions and peppers for the shrimp fajitas.


Feel free to mix and match vegetables and proteins, and to play around with other vegetables for this exuberant one-dish meal.



Steak Fajitas
http://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1018078-steak-fajitas

Chicken Fajitas
http://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1018100-chicken-fajitas

Shrimp Fajitas with Peppers
http://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1018101-shrimp-fajitas-with-peppers-and-zucchini

Salsa Fresca
http://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1018098-salsa-fresca

Green Salsa
http://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1018103-quick-green-salsa

Last edited by Goose (5/07/2016 5:43 am)