Three proteins? That's my kind of salad!
Alexis and I made this Tri-Tip Cobb Salad for dinner this week. It's not really an authentic Cobb salad...maybe Cobb-ish? Whatever you want to call it, it's delicious. It features:
- Reverse-seared beef tri-tip.
- Home-cured & smoked sorghum bacon (a recipe from our second book)
- Homemade yeast roll croutons
- Hard-boiled eggs
- Sliced tomato
- French fried onions
- Spring mix
- Homemade blue cheese dressing
I had been craving beef tri-tip recently because Dan Phelps posted one that he cooked on his Kamado Joe at
Learning To Smoke. I mentioned to him that I hadn't seen tri-tip in the Knoxville area in quite a while and then BAM! The very next week, I stumbled across a tri-tip! The Baader-Meinhof effect for meat, perhaps?
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| I lightly coated the tri-tip with avocado oil and then liberally applied the Santa Maria rub all over. A lot of people ask me about avocado oil. It is a high-temperature cooking oil that's excellent for grilling. It has a neutral flavor, much like olive oil doesn't taste like olives, and peanut oil doesn't taste like peanuts. |
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| My weapons of choice this day were my large Egg in the Challenger Designs cart, and I used the Mini-Max to fire roast a couple of potatoes. Before you comment, yes, that Egg is out of alignment. I need to get new rings, those are 10 years old, and they just won't hold for long. I've been avoiding dealing with that. When it matters, I use the other Egg in the BGE table, which is newer and in better condition. |
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| You could use a convEGGtor and standard rack, but I used a slightly different set up to make the reverse-sear easier. I have my cast iron grates on the bottom so that they are pre-heating during the "smoke" part of the reverse-sear. On top, I have an adjustable rig, and I put a heat stone/drip pan on the lower rack creating my indirect setup. That way, when it's time to sear, I just pull out the Adjustable Rig, and I don't have to handle a hot convEGGtor. |
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| I slow roasted the tri-tip at 275°f until it reached an internal temperature of 125°f. That took a little over an hour. |
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| I pulled the tri-tip and let it rest. I used a Thermoworks Smoke remote probe thermometer to watch the carry-over cooking. Once it peaked and began to fall, I knew that the roast was ready to sear. The rest is a crucial step in the reverse-sear method. It dissipates the energy doing the cooking and keeps you from overshooting the temperature during the sear portion of the cook. |
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| While the tri-tip was resting, I removed the Adjustable Rig and opened the lower vent to get the coals red hot. The Egg was running about 550°f at this point. I seared it about one minute per side and then hit the edges. |
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| Just like my steaks, I always rest roasts on a resting rack. This trick avoids trapping heat between the meat and a counter surface, which will steam the meat, causing it to lose more juices. Try it yourself sometime. Cook two steaks, place one on a rack, and the other on a plate. Compare the juices lost after 5 minutes and you will see the difference. |
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| Beautiful and crispy on the outside.... |
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| ...tender and juicy on the inside! |
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| The first night, we ate it with a robust chimichurri - fantastic. |
I daydreamed the salad up while at work, waiting on a server to restart. I knew I had the tri-tip at home, and I started thinking of a "steakhouse salad." It was so good that we ate it two nights in a row.
You don't need a recipe for the salad, you can figure it out just by looking. For the croutons, I cut up a yeast roll, tossed the cubes in garlic butter and roasted them at 400°f on a quarter sheet pan. Here is the blue cheese dressing recipe that we use.
Blue Cheese Dressing
- 1 cup Duke's Mayonnaise
- 3/4 cup sour cream or Greek yogurt
- 1/4 cup half-and-half
- 1/4 cup buttermilk
- 1/2 cup blue cheese crumbled
- 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
- 1 teaspoon red wine vinegar
- 1/2 teaspoon Kosher Salt
- 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
- 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
- 1/4 teaspoon celery seed
- 1/4 teaspoon cayenne
Mix all ingredients together and refrigerate for a few hours before serving.
