Burnt My Fingers

Santa Maria style barbecue: trim-tip cooked sous vide, then seared.

We ran into a good deal on tri tip roasts on a trip to San Francisco. This cut is rarely seen on the East Coast, so it was a no brainer to grab a couple of roasts and stuff them into our carry on. They spent the winter in the freezer, then emerged a few weeks ago as barbecue season arrived. And the first thing we thought about was Santa Maria style barbecue.

Santa Maria and the California central coast in general is a land of rolling hills covered with dry grasses and a scattering of live oaks. It’s cattle country, and one can imagine nineteenth century vaqueros making a nice steak dinner over an open fire. But the transition from that to an official barbecue “style” is a little more complex and has a whiff of commercialism to it.

Wikipedia mentions several places on the central coast that started a formal Santa Maria style barbecue service in the 1950s… not all that long ago. The meat was served with pinquito beans (a variety of small bean grown in the area) and fresh Mexican style salsa, both reasonable additions, along with green salad and bread that seem like an afterthought. Our friend Philip Henderson, a frequent contributor on this blog, lives right in the middle of the central coast and doesn’t patronize any of the local barbecue places because they are too expensive for what you get. He has his own tri-tip method that involves searing it in a cast iron pan then finishing it in a slow oven.

Beans to accompany our Santa Maria style barbecue.

As to why Santa Maria style barbecue is synonymous with tritip, here’s an answer from a friendly chatbot: “The iconic Santa Maria Style barbecue, which originated in California, initially featured top-block sirloin roasted over a red oak fire. However, in the 1950s, a local butcher named Bob Schutz introduced the tri-tip, a triangular cut from the sirloin, to locals’ taste buds. Prior to this, tri-tip was often used for ground beef or stew meat.” Here’s a fabrication video in which a butcher breaks down a tri tip which is basically a sirloin steak, with the unique feature that the grain changes direction in the middle of the cut. It’s usually treated as a roast because of its thickness but can also be sliced into small individual steaks for stir fries and such, or butterflied to produce an impressive individual steak.

But enough background. Let’s make some Santa Maria style barbecue. One key element seems to be the Santa Maria grill. We were pleased to find this is an actual item, with a large grilling surface that can be raised and lowered to control the exposure of the meat to the heat. The meat is initially cooked over a hot fire to form a crust, then continues cooking at a lower temperature until tender with indirect heat over the same fire. This is where they potentially lose us because we Texans hate to lose all that good and flavorful smoke which is what happens when you cook meat on an open grill.

The remains of our tritip roast shows the point aw which grain changes direction.

Due to these misgivings we decided to cook our meat with a reverse sear/sous vide approach. A 4 lb tri-tip roast was slathered with a salt/pepper/garlic powder rub (no sugar) then vacuum sealed and cooked at 131 degrees for 5 hours, the recommendation in this Reddit conversation. We then finished the meat over charcoal briquettes which got too hot but did not ruin the meat, just sealed it nicely. The result was excellent, nice and beefy but not particularly smoky in taste. A lean roast like needs to be carved against the grain; when the carver went in the wrong direction for a few cuts it was still tender because the meat was properly cooked.

As to the beans, we used Rancho Gordo Cranberry Beans because that’s what we had on hand. The many recipe variations have in common a/an infusion of aromatics cooked in bacon or bacon grease and b/a good amount of smoky chili powder such as ancho. Some recipes add sugar or another sweetener; we tried a bit of brown sugar and wouldn’t do that again. Verdict: a fine pot of beans but not worth publishing as a recipe; hard to go wrong with good beans and flavorful add-ins.

As we were wrapping this up, our central coast friend forwarded this Sizzle Central link from the Santa Maria promotional agency. Turns out there was a barbecue festival on May 11… mark your calendar for next year. And you can download a Santa Maria style barbecue cookbook with fairly basic recipes for all the fixin’s. Also, here’s an article from SFGate in which the correspondent attends the “Cook Your Own” night at the Santa Maria Elks, which is apparently nirvana for Santa Style barbecue lovers. Interesting that the meats on offer include steaks and chicken… but, oddly enough, no tri-tip.