Still cooking from The New Steak. Last week it was marinated flank steak with diced Asian pear on sesame noodles. Iris, it turns out, really likes Asian pears, especially if they’re tossed with a little lime juice.

I’ve long maintained that I could happily eat spicy noodles with meat and vegetables every day for the rest of my life, and this recipe did nothing to change my opinion. But I also learned something about flank steak.

Actually, the recipe in the book called for flatiron steak, an inexpensive and tender cut that I haven’t figured out how to cook properly. (It never tastes right to me.) So I used flank. But I followed, as best I could, the instruction in the book to cut the steak into chunks before cooking it. It wasn’t clear what size of chunks Cree LeFavour was talking about, so I cut the flank into something like 3"×3" squares.

This had several advantages over cooking a whole large piece of flank. It was easy to get all the steak cooked medium-rare, because I could poke or take the temperature of each piece separately. It was easier to get a good sear on it; on a whole flank steak there are always parts that make poor contact with the pan. And there were plenty of burnt edge pieces, which are especially great in a bowl of noodles.

I’m going to cook flank steak this way from now on. In fact, I did it again last night, when I made steak tacos with tomatillo salsa. And some Mexican street corn.