Skirt Steak Marinade with Chimichurri Recipe – No grill is complete without my insanely flavorful skirt or flank steak marinade with chimichurri sauce! Easy, absolutely delicious and beyond flavorful!
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The Perks and Highlights for the Best Skirt Steak Marinade
Cuisine Inspiration: Latin American flavors
Primary Cooking Method: Marinating and grilling, baby!
Dietary Info: Gluten-free and absolutely full of protein.
Key Flavor: The dominant flavors are a tantalizing mix of zesty citrus, rich olive oil, salty soy sauce, tangy apple cider vinegar, aromatic garlic, and a splash of umami from the Worcestershire sauce. The chimichurri sauce adds a fresh, herby kick to round everything out.
Skill Level Required: Pretty easy
Sweet Highlights:
- Zesty Citrus Magic: The citrus juices help tenderize the steak, ensuring every bite is mouth-wateringly soft.
- Garlic’s Bold Embrace: Garlic adds a depth of flavor that transforms the marinade from good to “can I bathe in this?”
- Chimichurri Charm: This sauce is the unsung hero of the recipe, adding a fresh, herby layer
- Soy Sauce Savvy: A splash of soy brings all the ingredients together
- Grill Marks for Days: There’s something undeniably magical about the smoky goodness that a grill imparts on steak, making this dish a summertime (or anytime!) favorite.
What is Skirt Steak?
Skirt steak is a long cut of beef that’s sliced thinly from the diaphragm muscles of the cow. It is one of the most flavorful cuts of beef but can be a little on the tougher side because of the connective tissue in the cow’s diaphragm muscles. That’s where marinades come in to help tenderize the meat.
Ingredients
The flavor is unreal. Because of the texture of skirt steak (I love to use it here in my carne asada as well) and flank steak, I wanted to make sure I used a marinade recipe that would really infuse a ton of flavor and also help to tenderize the meat. The texture is very different than this london broil, cube steak or ribeye steak, which is much more tender.
The ingredients contained in this marinade including:
- olive oil
- orange juice
- lime juice
- soy sauce
- Worcestershire sauce
- apple cider or red wine vinegar
- minced garlic
Ingredients like lime juice and soy sauce add acid to really break down the toughness of the steak, and it couldn’t taste better if you ask me. That citrus essence gets right down in each and every bite. Put your completed marinade in a resealable plastic bag and add your steak pieces. Refrigerate and marinate for 6 to 7 hours.
Can You Marinate Too Long?
Optimally, for tough steaks like skirt and flank, it’s best to marinate it no longer than 24 hours in the refrigerator. Beyond overnight marinating is overkill. Also, never re-use a marinade.
How to Cook Skirt Steak
Before placing your marinated skirt or flank steak on the grill, it’s important to liberally season the meat on both sides with salt and pepper. Allow your charcoal or gas grill to get good and hot.
Place your steak on the grill and cook both sides for 4 to 6 minutes. The meat should be perfectly charred with wonderful grill marks and have a golden brown color. Remove from the grill and allow the meat to rest for around 5 minutes.
After grilling your steak and allowing it to rest is the best time to cut it. Take your steak and always cut against the grain in thin slices.
Adding Chimichurri Sauce
Adding my chimichurri sauce, takes this recipe to a whole new level y’all. This chimichurri sauce is so fresh with clean flavors. Cilantro and parsley are already so fresh but when added with fresh lime juice, the essence is just so wonderful. It is a lovely accent to this dish.
You can whip this chimichurri recipe up in your heavy duty blender or food processor. The flavors just come together so perfectly with the steak.
More Grilled Recipes
- This Grilled Ribeye Steak with Tequila Glaze is everything!
- These BBQ Baby Back Ribs are incredible!!!
- Grilled Proscuitto Arugula Pizza is necessary!
- What’s a grill without chicken? This Tequila Lime Chicken is necessary.
- This Carne Asada makes my life every time I grill it!
- And finally get this Grilled Catfish recipe on the grill immediately.
Skirt Steak Marinade Recipe with Chimichurri Recipe
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Ingredients
For the Marinade and Grilling:
- 2/3 cup olive oil
- 1/2 cup fresh orange juice
- 1/3 cup fresh lime juice
- 1/4 cup soy sauce
- 1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
- 3 tablespoons apple cider or red wine vinegar
- 4 garlic cloves minced
- 1 pound skirt steak
- Salt and pepper to taste
For the Chimichurri Sauce:
- 1 cup fresh parsley
- 1 cup fresh cilantro
- 1/4-1/3 cup olive oil
- 1/2 medium onion diced
- 3 garlic cloves
- 3 tablespoons fresh lime juice
- 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 teaspoon pepper
- Optional: 1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
Instructions
For the Marinade and Grilling:
- Whisk all of the ingredients together and pour into a large ziploc bag.
- Add skirt steak to ziploc bag with marinade and allow to marinade up to 6-7 hours max depending on how thick the meat is.
- When ready to grill, liberally season with salt and pepper.
- Grill until golden brown and perfectly charred then allow to rest before slicing on a cutting board.
For the Chimichurri:
- Add all of the ingredients to a heavy duty blender or food processor and blend until everything is chopped up and smooth then serve. Seriously that easy.
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Thank you so much for this recipe! I made this dish for Valentine’s day and my boyfriend and I loved it! Also, I actually couldn’t find regular orange juice at a shop near me (I was short on time) and picked up orange pineapple juice for the marinade. It was still really delicious.
Oh fantastic!!! I’m so so glad you enjoyed it!
Ummm I’m pretty sure this is my favorite dish right now. I used the marinade on steak and chicken and it was delicious and the chimichurri sauce is amazing. I hate parsley so I just used cilantro and it is so yummy! The chimichurri is also delicious on scrambled eggs. Thank you!
Made this tonight and want to thank you for the great recipe! I put the marinade together last night and marinated the meat overnight. I made the sauce this morning and let it meld until dinner time. Received rave reviews from my family! The flavor and texture of the meat was excellent and we really enjoyed the chimichurri. Thanks, again!
Oh wonderful! I’m so glad you enjoyed it Dave!
Turned out great on our cast iron skillet, it tasted like summer! Beat the rainy day blues away! I have decent amount of chimichurri left, I may throw in on some grilled chicken.
Wonderful idea!!! It is fantastic on chicken.
Made this last night- my mouth is still watering. Thank you so much for sharing! We didn’t have company over last night, so we threw a bit more garlic in the chimichurri sauce…
Looking forward to trying out more of your recipes, Jocelyn!
I’m so glad you enjoyed! More garlic sounds great to me!
This is a keeper! The steak marinade was delicious as was the sauce. FYI.. I only had time to marinate the meat for 5 hours. To help tenderize the meat I pounded it first then put it in the marinade. But I think a flavor trick I had was to make the marinade with everything except the olive oil at first. Then put the meat in the bag and rubbed all that acidic marinade right into the meat. Then I went back and poured the olive oil into the bag.
I’m a mom of 3 so I look for easy and delicious recipes. This surpassed my expectations. I only have a few meals I cook when I entertain and this will be added to that list.
Wonderful! I’m so happy to read this.
Can I use apple cider vinegar again instead of red wine vinegar in the chimichurri? I don’t have red wine vinegar and I don’t want to buy it just to use a couple tablespoons.
Yep you totally can!