How to Make Argentine Asado with Chimichurri — The Pampas Gaucho Tradition

Transcript

Show Host: It is six in the evening on a Saturday in Palermo, the smell of quebracho wood smoke is hanging over half of Buenos Aires, and every porteña family is about to spend three hours around a single iron grate eating slowly through ten different cuts of beef. Tonight we cook the real Argentine asado — gaucho-tradition fire, exact cuts, exact times, sal gruesa only, and the chimichurri that defines a Pampas table. Joining me are an Asador out of the Pampas and a Parrilla Chef out of Palermo.

Asador: Asado comes from the gauchos on the open Pampas in the seventeen-hundreds. They dug a shallow trench, burned hardwood down to embers, staked the meat on iron crosses around the coals, and ate everything from the cow head to tail. Today the parrilla grate has replaced the cross but the principle is exactly the same. Indirect heat, slow, no marinade, no sauce on the meat during cooking. The only seasoning is sal gruesa — coarse rock salt — applied at the start. Patience cooks the beef. Twenty-six pounds of meat for ten guests is a normal Saturday asado.

Parrilla Chef: The order of the cuts matters. We start light and finish heavy. First the chorizos and morcillas — pork sausages and blood sausages — twenty minutes over moderate coals. Then mollejas — sweetbreads — twenty-five minutes. Then chinchulines — chitterlings — thirty minutes. Then the big plate. Tira de asado, the short-rib cross-cut three centimeters thick, takes forty-five minutes over the coals. Vacío — flank — needs one full hour. And the king, bife de chorizo, the boneless sirloin cut three centimeters thick, gets five to seven minutes per side. All of it served with chimichurri on the side.

Asador: The fire is the whole game. Use hardwood — quebracho if you can get it, oak or hickory otherwise — never softwood, never charcoal briquettes. Burn the wood down to red-glowing embers for at least forty-five minutes before any meat goes on. The coals sit under one half of the parrilla, never directly under the meat. The grate sits thirty to forty centimeters above the embers — your hand should tolerate exactly four seconds at grate height, that is your target temperature of about four-hundred-eighty degrees Fahrenheit, two-hundred-fifty Celsius. Shovel fresh embers in every twenty minutes.

Parrilla Chef: Salt the meat with one heavy tablespoon of sal gruesa per pound just before it goes on the grate. Do not pepper. Do not oil. Do not flip more than once. The bife de chorizo goes on, you wait five minutes, you turn it ninety degrees for cross-hatch grill marks at two minutes, then flip it once, five more minutes. Pull at internal one-hundred-twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit, fifty-two Celsius, for jugoso — the perfect Argentine medium-rare. Rest five minutes on a warm wooden board. Slice across the grain, half-inch thick. Plate. Serve with chimichurri on the side, never on top.

Asador: Chimichurri is older than asado itself and the recipe is non-negotiable. One full cup of fresh flat-leaf parsley finely chopped, never blended. Four cloves of fresh garlic minced, never pressed. One full tablespoon of dried oregano. Half a teaspoon red pepper flakes — adjust to taste, never replaced with chili powder. Half a teaspoon coarse salt. Quarter cup red wine vinegar. Half a cup of good extra-virgin olive oil. Combine in a glass jar in that exact order. Shake. Rest at room temperature minimum thirty minutes, ideally two hours. Never refrigerate before serving — the cold kills the volatile oils.

Parrilla Chef: Salsa criolla is the second side, and every parrilla makes one. Finely dice one ripe tomato, half a red onion, half a red bell pepper, two tablespoons fresh parsley. Dress with three tablespoons olive oil, two tablespoons red wine vinegar, half teaspoon salt, fresh black pepper. Rest twenty minutes. It cuts the fat of the cuts that follow forty-five minutes on a parrilla. And a basket of crusty pan francés — a French-style baguette — to mop the chimichurri. A bottle of Malbec from Mendoza on the table. That is the full asado. Three hours, ten people, one fire.

Asador: Five common mistakes to avoid. One — direct flame on the meat. The flames carbonize the surface. Always cook over embers, never under flame. Two — marinade. A real asado uses only sal gruesa. Marinades hide the cut. Three — flipping more than once. Each flip drops the surface temperature ten degrees. Four — pepper. Black pepper burns at high heat and turns acrid. Add at the table. Five — chimichurri on the meat before it rests. The acid breaks the crust. Spoon chimichurri beside the meat or on top after it has rested and been sliced.

Show Host: Three takeaways. One — fire is everything. Quebracho or oak hardwood burned to red embers for forty-five minutes, grate thirty to forty centimeters above the coals, hand-test four seconds at grate height. Two — sal gruesa only, one heavy tablespoon per pound, no marinade, no pepper, no oil. Bife de chorizo five to seven minutes per side, pull at one-twenty-five Fahrenheit, fifty-two Celsius, rest five minutes. Three — chimichurri is one cup parsley, four garlic, one tablespoon oregano, half teaspoon red pepper flakes, quarter cup red wine vinegar, half cup olive oil, rest thirty minutes minimum. Thank you, Asador. Thank you, Parrilla Chef.