Steak - Mark Schatzker [92]
Vicky and her family eat steak a minimum of three times a week, but their beef loyalty is not restricted to consumption. Steak suffuses the family architecture. About thirty years ago, Vicky and Steve built a lovely brick home in a leafy suburb of Buenos Aires called La Horqueta. In the back garden they put in a pool, and behind it erected a handsome brick structure covered in vines that is dedicated to the cooking of steak. In one wall sits the greatest steak-cooking apparatus ever conceived by humankind. Picture a grand fireplace inside which hangs, suspended from chains, a grill that is four feet wide. Like the fabulous grills of Italy, its height is adjustable. A crank sprouts out of one wall, and if you turn it in one direction, the grill rises, and if you turn it in the other, it descends toward the coals.
If this were all there was to Vicky and Steve’s steak grill, it would deserve a standing ovation. But my fifth cousin’s grill solves the single greatest encumbrance to wood-fired steak cooking: the running-out-of-coals problem. When you cook a steak over wood, the wood has to burn down until it’s reduced to glowing coals, because during the yellow-flame stage it emits all sorts of gases and particles that leave an unpleasant taste on the crust of a steak. But there is a problem with coals: they don’t last very long. And when coals start fading, you’re in trouble. You can’t just add wood to the fire because it will burst into yellow flame and begin emitting unpleasant gases. If your steaks aren’t finished cooking by the time your coals have expired, you may as well tell your guests to go home.
Unless, of course, you are cooking on Steve and Vicky’s adjustable-height grill, because sitting immediately next to the grill is a metal basket that is a glowing coal factory. Fresh wood is placed in the basket and ignited; half an hour later, little glowing chunks start falling out the bottom, which can be moved into position beneath the hissing meat. More wood is then loaded into the basket, and the system thus provides you with a theoretically limitless supply of perfectly glowing coals.
Through a freak of historical accident and far-flung kinship, I now found myself in the home of two great steak fanatics in the most steak-loving country on earth. Their fantastic grill, they told me, had a name: parilla (pronounced “pa-rhee-sha” in Buenos Aires, “pa-rhee-ya” in standard Spanish). They fuel it with a special hardwood from the north of Argentina called quebracho that can be bought, of all places, at the supermarket. Whenever Steve or Vicky or any of their children feel the stirrings of meat hunger, they can go to the supermarket to buy steak and grab a bag of quebracho while they’re at it.
All sorts of Argentines, it so happens, make weekly steak-and-quebracho runs, and the reason is that all sorts of Argentines have adjustable-height quebracho-fired grills, just like Vicky and Steve. To an Argentine, a parilla is about as unremarkable as a flush toilet, though perhaps more essential. If you are in the market to buy a home in Argentina and you go to an open house, you expect to appraise the parilla just as you expect to appraise the master bedroom and the kitchen. The lack of a parilla might give you leverage to bargain the seller down. It is not just leafy suburbs that have parillas. The shantytowns that house Buenos Aires’ less fortunate have a simpler version of the device: a half barrel with a grill on top. Many of the apartment buildings in downtown Buenos Aires feature rooftop parillas, so that the residents are not denied the national birthright of grilling steak outdoors over wood. (“But this is still not one’s own parilla,” Steve astutely pointed out.) Some buildings, however, have no parilla at all, and many Argentines would never consider living in these places.
We got in Steve’s car and saw little parilla chimneys sprouting over the top of fences all over the neighborhood. A few had gray smoke curling