Bigly Beef Skewers

Sit down for this one. Beef skewers. BIGLY beef skewers. The most underrated grill item in the American backyard — and I have stood at more grills than any person you have ever met, more grills than the burger flipper at the world's busiest cookout, more grills than the guy at the state fair with the suspenders and the elbow-length tongs. Folks, I know my way around a stick of meat. And what people get wrong about beef skewers is EVERYTHING. They use the wrong cut. They cube it too small. They marinate it for ten minutes like that means anything. They cram seven peppers and a pineapple onto the stick. Then they cook it until it's gray. A disgrace to the kabob.

A guy named Ramón taught me to do skewers properly. Ramón ran a backyard operation in the Texas hill country — no menu, no signage, just a smoker, a long folding table, and a cooler of beer for the regulars — and Ramón had ONE rule that he repeated every single time I visited. He'd point at the grill, point at the skewer, point at me, and say: 'meat on its own stick, veg on its own stick.' Then he'd nod and walk away. That's it. That was the entire lesson. And it was the most important lesson I ever got, because veg and beef cook at DIFFERENT SPEEDS, and when you put them on the same stick you end up with overdone meat and crunchy raw onion, which is the WORST of both worlds, which is a TRAGEDY of two textures. Ramón knew. Ramón always knew.

The other secret is the cut. Use sirloin. Use top sirloin specifically — beautiful marbling, naturally tender, takes a marinade like it was born for it. Skip the so-called 'kabob meat' in the foam tray at the grocery store — that's almost always tough scraps from the round masquerading as something better, sad little cubes of disappointment shrinkwrapped to a tray. An insult. Cube your own from a single steak. Marinate it for at least four hours. Then thread it loose on the stick, leaving a little air between cubes so every face can sear. That's the kabob. That's the assignment. That's how Ramón did it. That's how we do it.

There you go. A platter of beautifully charred beef cubes, a second platter of smoky onion and pepper and mushroom, two piles of color and smell that make the neighbors lean over the fence. Cookouts are won and lost on the skewer game — believe me — and you have just won the cookout. Serve them straight off the platter, hand them out to your people, and let the compliments roll in. Ramón would be proud. We did it.