I just got back from Uruguay, where I was attending the Punta Del Este Food and Wine Festival. This was an awesome event; the country was gorgeous, it’s late spring there, and the constant flow of great wine and meat nearly made me want to stay there. (Had I not been married, I probably would have.) My reason for coming was a simple one: I wanted to learn about asado. Argentina and Uruguay, both major beef-producing regions, do some of the best asado anywhere; and I, who so idealize the connection between live fires and dead animals, needed to see it at its best.
Asado, I should say here, is not a food; it’s both an event and a technique. In the same way that we talk about having a barbecue, and eating barbecue, and “barbecuing” meat, asado is exactly comparable. But the thing to understand about it is that it isn’t barbecue. Asado, technically is grilling; specifically, girlling over wood. And man, do they know how to grill. Coals, logs, embers, ash: every stage in the process of releasing energy from wood gets used. Buckerminster Fuller, the technological visionary, once told some children when they asked why a log burned, “the tree took in sunlight for many years. Now it’s letting it out.” There was indeed something of a cosmic feeling with this kind of grilling, and it is never done better than by Francis Mallman, the Argentine grilling guru was the host of the most exciting event, a mini-Meatopia in which a variety of animals were cooked over Mallman’s “Seven Fires.” It would be hard to describe the mood at Mallman’s boutique Montivdeo hotel, as local wines poured (Uruguay has an awesome wine industry) and plate after plate of succulent lamb, beef, pork, chicken, and more beef were brought in.
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The asado typically involves multiple meats, which is one reason I like it so much. Sometimes this takes the form of Mallman’s muliple grilling stations approach; other times you can see guys cooking many kinds of meat with one fire, by the canny placement and movement of the meats from one zone to another, and by the raking of coals and ashes to different spots as the wood burns down. Here’s a video of one such fire:
WATCH: Grill restaurant in Montevedeo
ur own grill hearth, I can’t imagine that a love of meat and fire can be said to live inside you. I enjoyed a lot about Punta del Este and Montevideo: the broad open skies, the green meadows with sheep, horses, and cattle wandering contentedly around on them, the free liquor at the parties. But the best part was the asado. I never thought I lived in a grilling backwater; but then, those of us who live in primitive conditions really do. We are like bushmen compared to these guys.