Argentine cuisine glows with wood-fire cooking
The flavour of the food is well preserved – you cannot get it from gas grills or frying pans
Flames glow, smoke billows and the aroma of slowly burning logs blends with the flavours of lightly charred calamari with broccoli and aioli cooked inside a handmade wood-fired oven.
Like other dishes at Proper restaurant, essential ingredients for this house favourite are timber and fire. Proper was recently named in the Latin American edition of the prestigious World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, part of Argentina’s growing international recognition for creative open-flame cooking.
The sacred Argentine “asado”, or barbecue, brings together families and friends, regardless of social class, and is a source of national pride. While grilling in other countries involves gas or store-bought charcoal, the Argentine way is often more primal – just wood, flames and meat.
“Fire is a very strong part of Argentina’s identity,” saysAugusto Mayer, who launched Proper last year in a refurbished auto-repair shop with fellow chef Leo Lanussol. “We have a bunch of ways of cooking with wood and we’re harnessing the potential of that type of cooking.”
Diners stand in long lines every night outside the restaurant in the trendy Palermo neighbuorhood of Buenos Aires, attracted by the scent of the vegetable-centric dishes. From a haricot bean puree with almonds and pumpkin-seed mole to celery with kefir cream, green apples and pecans. The owners take pride in their sourdough bread served with homemade butter and anchovies from the coastal city of Mar del Plata.
“Argentine cooking is going through a very important moment,” Nico Visne, a local food critic and journalist, says as he tries the calamari at a counter near the wood-burning oven. “It’s based in our gaucho [cowboy], indigenous and immigrant cooking – and there’s this return to the real flavours and the fire.”
It seems odd to call it a trend since flames are the oldest way of cooking food. And yet a growing number of chefs around the world have elevated wood-fire cooking to new heights at some of the most acclaimed restaurants like Spain’s Asador Etxebarri in the Basque countryside.
In Argentina, the precursor of this movement is Francis Mallmann. The country’s most famous chef and owner of three restaurants began his career cooking French food. At some point, he returned to the elemental ways of cooking that he knew growing up in his native Patagonia region. Many Argentines grew up watching Mallmann’s cooking shows on TV in the 1980s, long before he entranced audiences worldwide with his grilling methods in the Netflix docu-series Chef’s Table.