Steak - Mark Schatzker [93]
This was all to be expected. I was, after all, driving through a nice suburb in the land of fifty-five million grass-fed cattle, where every steak promised to taste like Angus Mackay’s Highland rib eye. Of course every house had a parilla. Of course mass grilling was taking place. Everything was finally making sense. That steak I had eaten years ago in the Peruvian restaurant in a mall in Chile was an Argentine steak, which explains why, when all that was left was a puddle of pink juice, I raised the plate to my lips and drank it. It explains why Argentines eat almost three pounds of steak a week. To eat that much steak, the steak, presumably, has to be tasty.
Vicky and Steve, still many ounces shy of their weekly three-pound mark, were driving, as they do on most Sunday nights, to their favorite neighborhood parilla—the word, it turns out, also refers to a restaurant with a parilla. When you walk into this particular parilla, the first thing you see is a very large grill half covered with red meat. It was like the dining room at Borgo San Felice, but on a grander scale—and much cheaper. This delighted me. I turned to Steve and asked, “Is it also a wood-burning grill? Or do the restaurants use gas?”
Steve’s smile disappeared, and, hurrying me to the table, he sat me down, leaned over, and said, “Mark, there is something you need to understand: gas is an abomination in this country.” We quickly moved on to a different subject: the asado, the name Argentines use for their beef-intensive version of a barbecue. If you invite friends to your house for steak, you are inviting them to an asado. Similarly, to visit a restaurant with a parilla, as we were doing, is to partake in the asado.
I scanned the menu. There were two to three times the number of cuts offered in an American steak house. Argentines love their rib eyes, strip loins, and tenderloins, but they love every part of a cow that can be successfully laid on a hot grill. There are quite a few, it turns out. Some of those parts weren’t even muscle—like sweetbreads, which is the curious English word for a cow’s thymus and pancreas glands. During an asado, they’re served as an appetizer, along with blood sausage, chorizo, and other nether parts—all off the parilla.
The first steak cut we were served was one you don’t find on North American grills. Argentines call it tira de asado, and it’s one of their cheaper cuts, although some Argentines would pay more for it than for tenderloin. Americans know it as short ribs, a stretch of rib meat cut across the bone that isn’t eaten as steak in North America, unless an Argentine happens to be in town. In Argentina, tira de asado is a blue-collar cut, but this does not bear a negative connotation. Tenderloin, which is the tenderest cut on a carcass, is often and justifiably derided as an old woman’s steak among Argentines. Real steak lovers eat tira de asado. A year earlier, Steve had moved his company, which analyzes lubrication oils, into a brand-new, custom-built building. As a gesture to the builders, he treated them to an asado on the last Friday of every month. He gave some cash to the contractor, who insisted on buying the beef personally. The cut he bought his men was tira de asado. The workers constructed an ad hoc parilla by stretching wire over loose bricks, and they grilled tira de asado on this unsophisticated but highly functional grill every day.
The tira de asado arrived Maillard-brown and crossed with black. The meat was gray through and through, which was not surprising. As much as Argentines revere steak, they buck the near-worldwide conviction among steak-loving peoples that steak should be served pink or red in the center. Argentines prefer their steak well done. (I didn’t believe it the first time I heard it, either.) While there is a loyal contingent that prefers it jugoso (juicy), they are in