In this instructional video, Cheryl McColgan, founder of Heal, Nourish, Grow, demonstrates how to make a keto-friendly carne asada using a grass‑fed Wagyu flank steak. She walks through each preparation step, starting with rough chopping of a large white onion, smashing and roughly chopping four garlic cloves, zesting and juicing a lime (using two small limes) and a blood orange, and preparing about a cup of fresh cilantro and a large jalapeño. Cheryl shares practical kitchen tips—rolling citrus before juicing, using a Microplane for zest, and how to peel garlic efficiently. She explains keto‑specific considerations, emphasizing that the small amount of fruit juice provides acidity for tenderizing without adding significant carbs, and that zest adds flavor without bitterness if the white pith is avoided. The meat is a locally sourced, grass‑fed Wagyu flank steak; she discusses rinsing, sanitizing surfaces, and optional tenderizing methods (fork, meat hammer, or tines). For marinating, she combines the dry ingredients (onion, garlic, cilantro, jalapeño, zest) with wet ingredients (lime and orange juice, olive oil, Worcestershire sauce, salt, pepper) in a large freezer bag, then transfers the mixture to a glass container to avoid plastic degradation from acidity. She advises massaging the steak to ensure even coating, recommends marinating overnight up to 24 hours for optimal flavor (minimum a few hours if time‑pressed), and notes the final step of grilling the steak. Throughout, Cheryl maintains an enthusiastic, conversational tone, offers cost‑saving hacks (e.g., $1 thrift‑shop juicer), and encourages viewers to adapt spice levels and storage methods to personal preferences. The video ends with a call to action to like, follow, and visit healnourishgrow.com for more recipes.
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Hello everyone, I'm Cheryl McColgan, founder of Heal, Nourish, Grow, and today I'm going to show you my keto carne asada recipe. So we'll start by prepping the vegetables. This calls for a large white onion. This is like an extra large white onion, so I'm actually using this in the chimichurri sauce that'll go with it, so I'll probably just use about half of this. But because this is a marinade, we're pretty much rough chopping everything. Nothing really needs to be finely chopped. So you can really just cut things in pieces for this recipe. So I like to take the outer skin off first, um, and everything's already been washed and ready to go. So we never usually do that in real life, but because we're doing a video, everything's ready for once. So as I mentioned, this is a rather large onion, so I'm just going to chop it in half so I have some to use for later. And then again, this is just a rough chop on the onions. I kind of like to do it in sixths or eighths, pretty big chunks. And then you'll leave that ready to go. And then the recipe calls for 4 cloves of garlic. If you love garlic, you know, feel free to put extra. It's not going to hurt it any. And this is just the, pretty much the easiest way I've learned of peeling and prepping garlic for recipes is to just do a nice little smash with the back of your knife, and then usually the skin comes off pretty easily after doing that. Just be careful, obviously, to avoid the blade, but I've never had that be an issue. So you could just leave these smashed. That's already released the the oil in the garlic, but I do like to just give them a little bit of a rough chop. So this big hunks, totally fine. And actually the skin, if there's any pieces of skin on this particular recipe, again, since it's a marinade, that really doesn't matter so much. And the next thing that calls for is the zest and juice of a large lime. We don't have large I didn't have any large limes, so I'm just going to use 2 of these smaller limes. And this is a nice tip for getting your juice in your citrus fruits, is to give it a roll first before you work on getting the juice out. And then for the zest, I've had this for probably— embarrassing to say— 20 years, a Microplane. It's a really nice kitchen tool to have, and it's comes in handy whenever you zest citrus fruits. And one of the nice things about keto, if you're trying to keep the sugar down, of course, you know, sometimes like in this recipe there is some fruit juice. It's pretty minimal and it doesn't get absorbed a lot by the meat. It's more the acid in the fruit that you want to help break down the meat fiber. And then, you know, some of the sugar may be absorbed, but not much. But where you can really get a lot of flavor is by using the zest of the citrus fruit. And when you zest, just be careful not to go too deep into the fruit because as you get towards the pith, the white part, that becomes quite bitter. So you really just want to focus your efforts on barely skimming off the dark green part on your lime. Okay, that's close enough. And then normally you just, you know, would have your one large lime if you have large limes available. But so this will have you end up with maybe, you know, 1 to 2 teaspoons of zest. I never really measure it. It's especially for a marinade, this blend of flavors is so awesome and quite honestly, having, you know, an extra teaspoon of zest here or there isn't going to make much difference. It'll just give you some extra flavor. So don't stress out too much about the amounts on this recipe. In fact, in general, I wouldn't stress out too much about amounts on recipes except for baking because it requires some more precision for sure. So you can see how much that ended up there. I'd say a teaspoon or two, perfect. And then once you have your, once you have your lime zested, you're just going to cut it in half. Now if you didn't have a juicer, I actually found this juicer at a thrift shop locally for a dollar, which was awesome. But if you don't have a juicer, you can just squeeze the lime., but since I do have it, I'm going to use it. There's also plenty of juicers on Amazon, but I was pretty happy to find this one for just a dollar. I never really had one in the past just because I don't use it all that often, but for a dollar it seemed worthwhile. And just set that aside. Now we'll move on to the orange. So it only calls for the juice of a half of an orange. Same thing here, you can roll it to get the juices flowing nicely. And then I'll zest first. Now again, since there's no— you're just getting the oil of the orange and the zest. This happens to be a blood orange, by the way, which is really awesome. We don't have them in Cincinnati year-round. But so normally if it's calling for the half of an orange, you could just zest half. But again, since the skin has all the oils and flavor. And because we're not adding any carbs, I'm just going to go ahead and zest the entire orange even though we'll just use half of the orange for juice. And then with your other half of an orange, obviously if not everybody's in your keto in your family, you might have somebody that wants that, but you could use it, um, as, you know, just a light flavoring for water. If you don't squeeze it, it's just going to add a very minimal amount of juice to your water. But because this has been zested, you've got some more of the oils on the Orange Explosive, so you'll get that nice flavor. So there's our orange zest, and now we'll get the juice from half of this beautiful blood orange. So any— of course, usually I just use regular old orange, but because this was available right now It's just got a very pretty look to it and some nice flavor. So now we'll prepare our cilantro. So I like getting these whenever I can find them. It's a live cilantro and they were on sale today at Kroger. All the live herbs were 2 for $4. So normally if I buy a bunch of cilantro at the grocery store, especially if I buy organic, it might cost me a dollar anyway. So what I'd like to do with this is I use this cilantro today, you know, tearing most of it off, and then I plant this, and then you'll have more cilantro in a few weeks. So I like to use those whenever they have them available. And then just leave, you know, make sure you leave a few leaves on there so it can get some sunlight, and then I will plant that later. So this recipe calls for about a cup of cilantro. Again, because it's a marinade, we're just doing a rough chop on the cilantro. And then 1 large jalapeño. This is a rather very large jalapeño, but I love jalapeños, so I'm going to go ahead and use the whole thing. If you're sensitive to spice, obviously don't use that much. You could leave it out, but I'd recommend at least, you know, just a slice or 2 to give it some of that nice green flavor. And we're just slicing the jalapeño. Another thing you can do to make it less spicy is cut it in half lengthwise first and remove the seeds. But again, I really like them. And then plus, I find that jalapeños nowadays from the grocery store just really aren't that spicy, so I've never had a problem with it being too bad. Now we're ready to put together the marinade and prepare the steak. So I have this beautiful— I visited a new butcher today in Cincinnati, and this is actually a local grass-fed Wagyu flank steak, which I am extremely excited about. So whenever I get a steak from Kroger, I, you know, I know that they're obviously following, we hope, the best, safest practices, but I always just like to give them a quick rinse, just get any bacteria that might be on the outside or just, you know, from sitting around a little bit. Just seems to freshen it, so I like to just give it a quick rinse. I have a plastic cutting board on hand anytime that I do meat, I always keep my booze block for strictly vegetable stuff just to keep everything very sanitary. And then so now we'll prep the meat, and what I like to use— you can use a handheld— what I usually use for a flank steak in particular is a handheld where you put the tines down in it and it kind of creates deeper holes. But since this is wagyu, it should be more tender to start with, so I'm not going to do too much of that. So you can use a good old-fashioned meat tenderizer, just looks like a hammer basically, or you can even just use a fork. So depending on what you have on hand, you'll just give the meat a quick once-over to loosen up the fibers and to allow our marinade to more fully penetrate. I actually— that's why I like the thing with the tines and using the fork is because it makes deeper holes in the meat, so it allows the marinade to penetrate a little more deeply. So really the hammer one kind of more spreads it out and loosens the fibers, and then I feel like using the fork lets it get in there nice and deep. So like I said, pretty exciting about this. It's like the local grass-fed wagyu, and that meat store is going to be the death of me, I think. Got so much great stuff. So now it's time to bring everything together. Usually I have a gallon freezer bag for this, which works fine, but our kids had a project at school where they needed some really big— look, I think this is 2.5 gallons. So since I have it, I'm going to use this. I've given some thought to this lately though, and I'm still going to use it to mix everything up and to kind of massage the meat a little bit. But then once I'm finished with that, I'm going to go ahead and release it into a glass container. Because we have acid in this recipe, it, you know, has a possibility to kind of break down the plastic, and that is not good for your health. So I've started to give that some more consideration lately as far as plastics and my use of them for storing food. So go ahead and just throw— oh, that was quite literally throw the onions in the bag. And then the garlic. And obviously this really doesn't make any difference what order you put these things into the bag, just as long as they all make it in there eventually. You may even want to use gloves for this, for handling. I like to try to scoop things up on the knife so I'm not touching the seeds and stuff too much, because once you get that hot oil on your fingers, it's very difficult to get off. Add our zest. So that was all the dry ingredients. Now we'll put in the wet ingredients. So you have your orange and lime juice going in, and then a half a cup of olive oil. And a half a cup of Worcestershire. So that's all of your— so that's all of your wet ingredients. And then salt and pepper, depending on how much salt you like. Uh, the recipe as I wrote it calls for half of a teaspoon each, but a little more or less in either direction is not going to hurt anything. So, and I really like using fresh cracked, so I don't always measure that super well. And then you've got your wagyu, so the wagyu will go in last. And then as you seal up the bag, just push out any air. And then now's the fun part. Massage the meat and make sure all the ingredients are broken up. Get everything nice and covered. Okay, so I've never read anything about how much plastic breaks down with, you know, acidic foods inside of it, so that might be not as much of a worry. Um, I have to do some research on that at some point, but obviously if you're just trying to avoid using plastics for your food stuff, you'll want to take this out and put it in a glass or a metal pan like a Pyrex, some kind of dish like that that can hold the meat easily, and then you'll just have to turn it a little more often and, you know, use a fork and stuff instead of where if you put this in the refrigerator as is, you know, every once in a while you can just turn it and massage it around a little bit more. So either way, totally up to you. I've done it this way for years. Hopefully it's not a huge health concern, but ideally you'll want to let this marinate overnight. So there you have it, that was the Keto Carne Asada Marinade. Ideally, you'll want to leave this in the refrigerator overnight, marinate up to 24 hours, and when you're ready, you're going to throw it on the grill. If you don't have 24 hours to marinate this, I would try to make it at least a couple hours. It just allows the flavors to develop more, so the longer you can leave it, the better. But I've done this before kind of on a last minute type of thing, marinate it for just hours and it's still very, very delicious. So there you go, keto carne asada. I hope you found this video helpful and please give us a thumbs up, a like, a follow. Check us out on our other channels and all the recipes are on healnourishgrow.com. See you again soon.
