Argentina is known for its beauty, variety, good wine and of course the almost mythical status of Argentinean beef. For the last ten years I have listened to my customers telling me that the best beef they have ever tasted was in Argentina. When I asked what was it about this beef that made it so good, they told me about the smell and sound of it sizzling over the quebracho embers, the large glass of hearty red wine to wash it down and the cool of the Pampas night refreshing them after the heat of the day. I couldn’t respond to my customers as I hadn’t been to Argentina, but their stories reminded me of great meals I’ve eaten abroad on holiday. Talking to Heston Blumenthal, whose approach to food is largely scientific, we agree that all the senses are engaged when eating food. The smells, sounds, sights, scenery, weather and activities preceding your meal all affect your perception of how it tastes. An uneven playing field perhaps comparing steak cooked at home on a frying pan to steak cooked in Argentina over quebracho embers? So with my customers’ comments ringing in my ears, I decided that the only way I could either agree with them or politely suggest that they were mistaken, was to go to Argentina and taste the beef for myself.
My first stop in Buenos Aires was to the local supermarket. Butchers are rare in Buenos Aires and most meat is sold in supermarkets. The family who run one of the capital’s large supermarkets, “Coto”, also run a large ranch. They allowed me to inspect their meat for marbling content, colour and appearance. I thought that the meat was too young, too lean and too fresh. The age of the beef equated to a 12 month old Heifer. This would be like drinking a Beaujolais when you wanted a Bordeaux. Many would find this standard of meat fine, preferring meat without much fat and a bright, fresh colour. The family told me that the quality of the meat sold in the supermarkets and used domestically has deteriorated with the better quality meat being exported. The range of cuts they use there is interesting. More of the animal is eaten; something which the British housewife would probably turn her nose up to!
That evening we went to a great steakhouse called “Rio Alba”. The place had real character with its high ceilings and fluorescent lights. I loved the fact the waiters wore bowties and white shirts. Very 1970’s modern. The meat that a premium business would buy was vastly different to the meat I had seen in the supermarket. They took me to the cold rooms where I saw their meat hanging. It’s not hung for long as you don’t hang a young animal for a long time. We hang our meat for longer as older animals stand up to longer maturing. I suppose it shows different tastes as we believe that an older animal which has been hung and matured for longer tastes better. “Rio Alba” had a marketing ploy which claimed that “our meat is so good you can cut it with a spoon”. It was more like hacking the meat with a spoon. For me, half the beauty is the way the knife glides through the meat. I thought the meat there was pretty good. I particularly enjoyed the “chincilinas”, veal intestines, which had been simmered in milk, finished over the wood grill and served with lemon and sea-salt. They were an acquired taste, a bit like your first pint of Guinness.
Buenos Aires’ Good Food Guide’s Number 1 steakhouse was called “La Cabrera”. This was where I first tried “asado de tira”. [say some more about this cut here] They prided themselves on this dish and served it with no less than 9 dipping sauces. The meat was good but you could see from the small bones just how young the animal was. The best steakhouse we went to, and the only one we went back to, was “Don Julio”. It was a cosy, local, family place with an earthy, inviting atmosphere. The waiters were passionate and smiling. The wines were temperature controlled and the grill was in the restaurant itself so you could see the meat cooking.
We flew from Buenos Aires to El Calafate, in the South-west of the country. The town itself was a pretty nasty, super-expensive, tourist hub that we couldn’t wait to get out of. The surrounding area was like the Wild West. As we drove along the open road the lunar vastness of the huge open spaces hit us. We saw lakes and enormous valleys that were 50 metres across. There was only one campsite open called “Lago Roca” and it was 100 kilometres away. A dirt track doubled for the road that would take us to our destination near the Perito Moreno Glacier.
On the road, we had to avoid wild horses and cattle and only passed a farm every 20 kilometres or so. When we called ahead the campsite told us they had meat and a barbeque we could use. On arrival, we were given a couple of bags of wood, a large piece of vacuum-packed meat and a carton of rock salt. Incidentally, there is no meat in Patagonia sold on the bone in order to avoid BSE. This meat came from a supermarket in El Calafate, which probably originally came from Buenos Aires. Anyway, I made a fire and covered the meat in rock salt. We didn’t have any firelighters but managed to get an inferno going within 5 minutes. I cooked the meat over the hot cinders, revolving it gently, for half an hour. Then I moved it off the heat source into a cooler area of the fire and cooked it slowly for a further hour, pressing it all the time to check its firmness. We were in the middle of nowhere; we didn’t even have cups so made some out of a tin and a water bottle. It was all so basic but the results were delicious!
Patagonia is not classic beef country. The weather is too harsh in winter. The sparse ground gets lashed by the wind as it comes down from the Andes. The area is better known for its sheep although that industry is in decline as there is not much money in the skins anymore. Given we were in lamb country, I was excited to try “cordero al asador”. Ricardo, our asador, split the lamb on either side of the back-bone. He attached it, spreadeagled, to the thingy and rested it at about a 65 degree angle to the fire. The golden rule of Argentine grilling is to always start cooking the meat bone-side down. This is because the bone is a good conductor of heat and starts cooking the meat around it. We three-quarter cooked the lamb bone-side down, which took about 2 ½ hours, then flipped it and cooked the remainder. Ricardo then chopped the lamb up nicely and laid it out on the parilla for further cooking. Unfortunately, the lamb was destroyed for me. It was horrible. Perversely the shoulder wasn’t cooked enough and the shoulder should never be eaten pink if you want to keep your teeth. Shoulder of lamb should be cooked slowly. The leg and the loin or saddle of lamb, where the fibres are close together and the meat is tender, should be cooked medium-rare and eaten pink. I watched this lamb being cooked and had a problem with it, but also wanted to be open to a surprise. It wasn’t a good surprise and I couldn’t even finish the meat. All the moisture inside the meat had started to boil and meat had become steamed. When I was in South Africa, I was shown how to inject the loin with a marinade which kept the meat moist. Had I been cooking Ricardo’s lamb, I might have applied the same technique here.
Next stop was Ushaia. After the heat of Buenos Aires, 8 degrees was a shock to the system. Flying into Ushaia over the Beagle Channel and all the islands was amazing. There are no sheep or cattle in Ushaia but there is lots and lots of timber. It is famous for its King Crab, “Centolla”, and I was told that you only find this species in Alaska and Ushaia. It was, without doubt, the best piece of sea-food I have ever put into my mouth. I have never seen anything like it, not to mind taste anything like it. The Capo de Horno beer was fantastic for washing the crab down.
We regrouped back in Buenos Aires and headed to the Iguazu Falls. The jungle was beautiful and hot and we saw Cayman on the river under a bridge. We crossed into Brazil while we were there to have a meal. They eat Picaña meat from the Zebu cattle in Brazil. The meat has a different fibre structure and tastes like beef soaked in water. The beef is stripped off a churrasco and served with accompaniments. I wasn’t keen on these, the texture or the taste of the meat. You don’t go to Iguazu for its meat and the only thing I learned about meat while I was there was how not to butcher and cook it. We ordered a rack of lamb in a restaurant. This is a delicate piece of meat and you should take time over trimming the bones. These tiny bones had been hacked to pieces and, sin of all sins, the paddy-whack (collagen) strip had been left in which tightens when cooked and the lamb becomes banana-shaped. The fat was still raw and the meat was over-cooked. All in all a disaster.
We ended the trip with a couple more days in Buenos Aires where we returned to the best Asador, Don Julio. We tried another restaurant called La Brigada which served up great wines but nothing really came out of the plate that I couldn’t have produced myself.
In the UK, meat is a premium food that we generally treat with respect. In Argentina, they have meat in abundance, more than they could ever use domestically. The Argentines boast that they have x acres per head of cattle, but the reality is that you don’t actually need all that grazing because an animal can only eat so much grass. The meat is cheap, about £1.50 per kilogram for ribeye steak on the bone, and the restaurants serve it in generous portions. There’s no denying that meat is a way of life in Argentina and that they love their meat, but in my opinion they are too relaxed in their approach to the butchering and cooking of it. The Argentines have the Rolls Royce of grills, the Asado, the best method of cooking meat on the planet, which has remained unchanged in years. Yet they butcher the meat badly and then mostly over-cook it. The result is a sirloin cut on the diagonal rather than across, which is dry and chewy. It’s a shame because the raw ingredients are present but the product is not up to scratch. The meat was always good but you knew it could be better.
Two proud Argentinean friends of mine, Franco and Alex, were probably disappointed with the meat they first tried over here, in much the same way as I was when I went to Argentina. They have an Argentinean grill in London and together we cooked some of my meat. Franco and Alex said that they had never tasted meat like it. I believe that when you apply Argentine techniques to our best meat you really have a killer combination.
