Fajitas on the Griddle
At our home, summer unofficially starts on Cinco de Mayo. Being from Southern California, we were influenced by the culture of the area.
This weekend, we had some friends over and made fajitas with homemade flour tortillas. We bought pre sliced steak and marinated it for a couple hours.
The marinade recipe is below.
- 1/4 cup soy sauce or coconut aminos (full of flavor with less salt)
- 1 cup pineapple juice
- 1 1/2 tsp minced garlic
- 1/2 cup vegetable oil
Mix it up and set aside about 1/2 cup of the marinade for later. Add the marinade to a 1 gallon bag with the steaks making sure that all of the meat gets coated. You should let the meat marinate for 2-12 hours.
While that marinated, we put our friends to work mixing up some tortilla dough. We wanted about a dozen tortillas, so we mixed up a batch using the recipe below.
- 3 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 1/2 tsp salt
- 6-8 Tbsp butter flavored shortening
- 1 cup water (hot from the tap)
In a large bowl, combine the flour and salt. Add the shortening and mix with your hand until it is well combined with the flour mix. You should end up with lots of small crumbles and no clumps.
Next add the hot water and it will make a wet dough similar in texture to sourdough. Keep mixing it with your hand until all of the water is absorbed, then turn it out onto the counter and knead the dough until it gets a fairly smooth texture (3-4 minutes).
Use a dough scraper or any knife to divide the dough into 12 equal parts which can be rolled into balls with your hands. Put them on a plate, cover with plastic wrap and put them into the fridge for 30 minutes.
We have a tortilla press, which works great for corn tortillas. We added some sheets of paper to make the tortillas thinner and it worked well. No tortilla press? No problem, you can roll them nice and thin into about 8″ rounds on a lightly floured surface.
Cook them in a hot skillet (medium-high on my stove) until they bubble up and start to char. Flip and repeat, and you have some yummy tortillas.
With the tortillas going, it was time to cook the fajitas. We had the griddle heated to a fairly high setting and a light coating of avocado oil was added. We roughly chopped 1 whole onion, one red and one yellow bell pepper with the seeds removed.
I cooked the meat first, letting it cook until the bottom was lightly charred and juices formed on the top, then turned it over. This is a thin cut of meat, so it cooks really quick. I then cut it into slices right on the griddle and put them into a bowl and set aside.
Next I threw on the onion and let it start cooking. You want this to get nice and soft. I also put the bell peppers on to get some nice charring on them. After about 5 minutes, the onions were ready, so I mixed them with the bell peppers and added one finely diced jalapeno pepper. I also seasoned with salt and pepper.
We’re almost done and it smells amazing!
I added the meat to the veggies, mixed it up to blend all of the wonderful flavors and then transferred it to a serving dish.
Serve hot off of the griddle with the homemade tortillas and enjoy!