So I happened to pick up a picanha steak.
It’s not a cut you see in most American markets or at butchers. It’s also known as sirloin cap or in France as culotte. It’s the cut that basically is just forward of the tail. The only place you might see it in the U.S. is in a Brazilian-style steakhouse because it’s a very popular cut there—it’s what gets sliced and put on those big sword-style skewers.
I don’t actually have a Brazilian cookbook and I don’t have any specific experience with or familiarity with Brazilian cuisine. So in cooking picanha and deciding what to do with it, I have to make up my own mind roughly speaking about what I want to do.
The first problem to solve is to understand what kind of treatment the steak itself needs. Seeing all those photos makes it clear that it has to be fairly tender—otherwise you couldn’t grill it like that and serve it straight off the grill. Doing a bit of online research confirms that. I like the suggestion I saw of searing the entire piece of meat in a cast iron pan on the fatty side (with some scoring on the fat cap) and then flipping it and putting the whole piece in a very hot oven for a quick roast, then slicing steak-sized cuts off it at service. Several websites discussing the cut are very insistent that it be cut on rather than against the grain, so that will be something to try and remember.
I’ve been reading across a few cookbooks and the NYT Cooking app and I’ve settled on small amounts of a number of sides—I’m going to make black beans and rice, but I want to chop fresh tomatoes and green chilis into them after they’ve cooked to try and lighten them up a bit. I’m going to bake some bananas with chili powder, cumin, lime and panko. I’m going to make some collards but not in the long-braised style—I’ll follow a NYT Cooking recipe that aims to quick fry some thin strips of collard. I might also quick-pickle a few cucumbers to get some acid into the meal. It’s a bit of a meat-two-veg and a bit cliched in terms of the specific accompaniments but that’s ok by me.