Gaucho Grilling
with Francis Mallman
Renowned Argentine chef Francis Mallmann is an expert at cooking with
fire: over it, under it, in it and around it. He invites writer Peter Kaminsky
to a grilled feast (and impromptu poetry reading) at his country house in the
Uruguay hills.
Many chefs talk (and talk
and talk) about a return to simplicity, but few have embraced this philosophy
as completely as Francis Mallmann. He cooks with wood fire and cast iron at his
three resolutely South American restaurants: 1884 Francis Mallmann, in the
Argentine wine region of Mendoza; Patagonia Sur, in Buenos Aires; and the
Hotel & Restaurant Garzon in Uruguay. But he hasn’t
always focused on such basic methods. In fact, he became Argentina’s best-known
chef at a young age by preparing haute-French food. “I could have gone on
forever serving fancy French dishes to wealthy Argentines,” he says.
The prospect bored him.
Then, in 1995, he was asked
to prepare a meal in a castle outside of Frankfurt for the esteemed L’Academie
de Cuisine. “I think a guardian angel—a very Argentine angel, from remotest
Patagonia—whispered in my ear,” he says. She suggested an entire menu featuring
potatoes, South America’s great gift to the world’s larder.
Francis came home with a new
vision: “I decided I was through with the pretentiousness of haute cuisine.
From that moment on, I wanted to cook with Argentine ingredients and wood
fires, the way I had seen gauchos and Indians cook when I was growing up in
Patagonia.”
His cooking these days is
largely based on wood fire. He utilizes every aspect of it, from the flames to
the hot ashes. He describes the various methods in a new cookbook that I have
written with him, Seven Fires: Grilling the
Argentine Way. One of Francis’s favorite methods involves the chapa (a cast-iron griddle, also
known as a plancha), because he loves how
quickly the cooking surface heats up. He also often cooks with a parrilla (a barbecue grate) over live
coals, the most popular method in Argentina and Uruguay as well as in the
United States.
We tasted some of his newest
recipes during a visit to his home in the countryside outside the village of
Garzón. I was with him the day he first decided to build a house here. We were
hiking through the classically Uruguayan landscape of lush, green, rolling
hills when Francis suddenly spied a clump of trees. He went in for a closer
look. When he emerged from the thicket, he said, “I am going to build a house
for my children here.”
I visualized a kids’ tree
house, but instead, Francis constructed a spectacular glassed-in,
cathedral-ceilinged, wood-frame building. Its main living space encompasses the
master bedroom, living room and kitchen, with a giant walk-in fireplace as its
centerpiece; shelves crammed with stunning editions of the world’s great poetry
line the walls. (Francis reads and speaks four languages.)
During my recent visit, he
began the grilling on a hilltop above his house. We started drinking bracingly
cold, sweet cocktails made with Campari and late-harvest wine. Dinner would
come eventually. Much of Francis’s cooking defies precise scheduling, since
fires and heating times vary so much depending on the place, the season, even
the direction and force of the wind. But Francis does have one unshakable rule
that defies the universal habit of constantly flipping food on the grill until
it is done. “Once your ingredient comes in contact with the heat, don’t move
it,” he said, placing a round of fresh goat cheese on a hot chapa set over the flames, where it
bubbled and formed a crisp, golden-brown crust. “You must respect that first
contact. Even if it’s not exactly in the right place, leave it alone.
Otherwise, you will break the crisp surface that begins to form and dry out
your food. Don’t touch!” he said, like a strict schoolmarm. He then carefully
transferred the warm goat cheese to a thick slice of toast and spooned a spicy,
briny olive mix on top.
While we ate the griddled goat cheese, he placed a large, flat
stone in the hot embers and let it sit for one hour. When he took the stone
out, he beat the ashes off the surface with an old cloth, then set down thin
slices of salmon. The fish emerged from a plume of smoke just a few minutes
later, tender and deliciously charred; Francis served it atop sweet, crunchy corn cakes. Sometimes he uses a chapa instead of the hot stone, but he
always cooks the salmon on one side only, to get both the smoky char and the
fresh, clean taste of raw salmon.
Demonstrating his “don’t
touch” principle once again, Francis gently placed fluffy mounds of grated
potatoes on the plancha for his
version of rösti (fried potato cakes). While we waited—and
waited—he told me true crunchiness requires cooking over low heat for a long
time. Meanwhile, he grilled juicy skirt steaks on a parrilla, then served them with the cracklingly crisp,
golden potatoes, tomatoes, and creamy, lemony mashed avocados.
As the sky faded into blue
darkness, Francis began to feed the flames until a bonfire illuminated the
faces of the friends gathered around. He lit a Havana cigar (he allows himself
one a day) and settled in with a glass of red wine. At a time like this, he can
often be convinced to share a favorite poem. On this night he chose “The Ballad
of the Ice-Worm Cocktail,” a nonsense poem by Robert W. Service. “No one ever
wants to sit around an electric oven or a gas stovetop reciting poetry,” he
observed as he finished. “But fire—well, it excites me and soothes the soul.”
Peter
Kaminsky collaborated with Francis Mallmann on Mallmann’s book, Seven Fires: Grilling the
Argentine Way.
Photos by Jean-Marc Wullschleger.
