Vegetarians Ruin Chicken-Fried Steak with Grapefruit-Fried Steak

I was going to say this is some kind of sick vegan joke, but they use some eggs in the recipe. So I guess it’s a sick ovo-lacto vegetarian joke.

Found on the Laura Lorenzo-Guerrero YouTube channel, they battered and pan-fried a grapefruit in order to create a bistek de toronja, or a grapefruit-fried steak.

Apparently you don’t even use the the pulpy part of the grapefruit though, just the white part between the fruit and the skin. It’s really like a grapefruit peel-fried steak. Not exactly the hardest recipe, as the pith is battered in eggs and panko flakes, peppered and pan-fried with garlic.

While this might be a vegetarian go-to now, Guerrero explained that this recipe originated from a pretty messed up time in Cuban history. It wasn’t vegetarians picking and choosing to make a fruit steak, it was Cubans having a shortage of food and having to using grapefruit pith as a replacement, basically as a survival method.

“Due to the shortage of food Cubans had to adjust their diet in order to survive.” Guerrero said. “This particular recipe was used for street food, usually people didn’t know it was from grapefruit.”

So a food once used as survival, is now used by as a vegetarian meat alternative. Thanks, vegetarians.