California Barbecued Tri-Tip

An unusual barbecue tradition has developed in California’s Santa Maria Valley. Unlike most other styles of barbecue, Santa Maria uses the large tri-tip cut of beef that is seasoned with only salt, pepper, garlic and the sweet smoke of the grill. And while most barbecue styles depend on indirect heat, long cooking, and low temperatures, Santa Maria recipes usually call for the tri-tip to be grilled over high heat. This consistently produced a charred exterior and very rare center, so we focused our testing on cooking the outside less and the inside more.

Test Kitchen Discoveries

• Tri-tip is usually referred to as a steak, but at its size (2 pounds and 3 inches thick) it need to be cooked like a roast. We pushed all of the coals in our grill to one side, creating a hot zone for cooking and a cooler one for finishing the meat slowly.
• Searing the tri-tip directly above smoldering wood chips left it tasting like the inside of a chimney. To lessen the impact of the smoke, we held off on the wood chips until after we’d seared the meat and moved it to the cool part of the grill.