Bistec Picado
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This is another dish I hadn’t heard of before I went to Panama. Bistec Picado roughly translates to “Chopped Beef,” but is closer to the pepper steak I had grown up eating in Chinese-Cuban joints in NYC. This dish again shows the mixture of cultures in Panama, using soy sauce from the Chinese migration, and a tomato based sauce with strong flavors from the Caribbean (what the Panamanians called al estillo criolla, meaning the Creole-style.) In Panama, I have found that the meat is usually not as tender or flavorful as I would like, so I did some searching on Cooks Illustrated, and found that they use blade steak in their stir fry recipes. I thought this would work here, because I was using the same technique of cooking the meat in small pieces about 80% of the way, and then finishing it in a sauce built in the same pan in which I sautéed the meat. I like to get my meat from the butcher when I can, starting from as large of a cut as possible. Here, I got a little less than a pound of blade (my butcher calls it chicken steak.) There is a line of connective tissue that runs right through the middle of this piece. Cut the meat into two large chunks at this line, and then trim away the tissue before slicing up for the dish.
