Guerrilla Grilling
I’ve tried—and loved—many of
Francis Mallman’s recipes, but I doubt I’ll ever attempt the leg of lamb hung
from a string over a fire. Sorry. Not in SoHo.
By Eugenia Bone in the Wall Street
Journal
Many times our dinner guests have asked my husband if he eats like this all
the time, and he says yes, and then inevitably they ask if he ever does any of
the cooking. That’s when I jump in and say, well, he does all the grilling. I
don’t want to say this makes him angry—it’s not like my husband has much of an
emotional investment in kitchen cred—but when I start raving about how good a
griller he is, he tends to give me his rather wilting “don’t throw me a bone”
look.
I am happy to report that Francis
Mallmann ’s “On Fire” helped resolve this particular marital problem. The
recipes are primarily marriages of fire-cooked foods served with
kitchen-prepared enhancements, so my husband can handle the outdoor functions
while I can handle the indoor stuff, producing delicious, beautiful dishes that
give us both a stake in dinner and a share of the attention.
Mr. Mallmann is one of South
America’s most well-known chefs, a food TV star and owner of three highly
regarded restaurants: 1884 in Mendoza, Argentina; Patagonia Sur
in Buenos Aires, and Garzón in Uruguay. Although he is French-trained, Mr.
Mallmann specializes in Argentinean ingredients and wood-fire cooking. His
milieu can be summarized by the way he prepares a tomato: Cut it at the
equator, jam it full of herbs and press it cut-side down on a super-hot skillet
until it burns. The resulting taste is a mixture of the hot char of the burn
side and the cool, fruity freshness of the raw side. It’s an unabashedly
sensual cooking style.
“On Fire” is Mr. Mallmann’s second
book on outdoor cooking, and it treads similar paths as his first, “Seven
Fires: Grilling the Argentinean Way” (2009). The 100 recipes are, by and large,
flavor bombs that are relatively easy to put together, if occasionally
demanding because they require techniques that take a few tries to master, such
as flipping a tortilla of prawns and potatoes or cooking a whole fish without
cauterizing it to the grill. “On Fire” is organized in the traditional manner
of a meal, with appetizer recipes first and pantry-type recipes last, but these
only constitute about a third of the book. The rest is text and photos.
Some of the text is useful, like a
fascinating breakdown of the different fire-cooking styles (also to be found in
“Seven Fires”). But a great deal is composed of panegyric ruminations on the
romance of searing meat in a snowy field or whipping out a portable grill, a
bottle of wine and a beret in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. “All [days] have
their charms and challenges to the builder of fires and the griller of food: a
barren winter hillside with the sun lighting up a halo of windswept snow. A
makeshift canopy by a lake shore as dark clouds, pregnant with rain, bear
down.” These are sentiments that swing far wide of the usual grill guy slapping
BBQ sauce on a brisket in the Reliant Stadium parking lot.
The conceit of “On Fire” is
guerrilla grilling. Mr. Mallmann is pictured in an array of jaunty, colorful
outfits and hats, in improbable corners of Paris, La Ruta Azul in Patagonia, in
Trancoso, Brazil, in New York City. He stands there flipping coals, drinking
wine, handling massive hunks of meat, peeling, carving, slicing, dicing . . .
selling the Mallmann mystique. Yet when I giggled over how many photos there
are of the very photogenic chef (he looks great in a poncho), a food-industry
friend shrugged and said, “You should see Bobby Flay’s book.”
It is the use of different
fire-cooking styles that really separates Mr. Mallmann from other
grillmeisters, and over the course of testing a number of recipes I came to a
greater appreciation for the variety of cooking techniques by which that
distinctive outdoor flavor can be achieved. The parrilla, or grill, the chapa,
or griddle, the rescoldo, or embers and ashes, and the horno, or
brick oven—each lends itself to particular types of food, and Mr. Mallmann’s
ability to push the flavor possibilities has fathered a much more diverse
collection of recipes than your typical grill book. This is a kind of macho
sophisticated cooking that is, on the one hand, so unpretentious as to be
almost brutal (as when the flame cooks the protein) but, on the other hand,
exhibits exquisite taste (as when the stove cooks the accessories).
This approach produces recipes both
elegant and true: grilled pork steaks topped with a heap of roasted baby grapes
on the stem, or scorched skate wing on a bed of warm boiled beans spiked with
chili peppers. Yet some of my favorite dishes in “On Fire” weren’t cooked on a
fire at all: the Red and Golden Beet Salad with Radishes and Soft Boiled Eggs
was delightful, the raw shredded vegetables a crunchy foil to the silky eggs.
The rich but light Abondigas With Lentils, also a stovetop dish, calls for
stewing the legumes in red wine and herbs and then adding tender beef and pork
meatballs. I’ve made it twice already.
There is some familiar stuff in Mr.
Mallmann’s book: Fig Salad With Burrata and Basil, or Duck Breast With Balsamic
Vinegar and Asparagus, but there are a few fresh takes on classic combinations
as well, such as a kind of deconstructed artichoke dip that calls for
griddle-cooked artichoke shavings with comte cheese melted all over, or a BLT
with crisp chicken skin instead of bacon. There are also a couple of recipes
that are fun to read but that I doubt I will ever attempt, like leg of lamb
hung from a string over a fire, maybe from a tree. Sorry. Not in SoHo.
But a handful of Mr. Mallmann’s
basic recipes offer cooking methods that are simple and simply brilliant: a
chilled flavored olive oil, where a jar of oil stuffed with herbs is chilled
until the oil congeals. For anyone who has ever despaired of keeping flavored
oil on top of food, despair no longer. Another inventive condiment calls for
plunging a glowing ember into cool paprika-spiked olive oil to create a smoky
taste. It’s culinary genius. His braised carrots are exquisitely sweet and
tender with their bit of feathery greens still attached. I even got off on the
chapa, a gaucho bread that is griddled, not baked, and was everything that a
soft white roll should be: ravished. My husband and I tore open the bread and
gleefully shoved in Mr. Mallmann’s pink slabs of rib eye and smashed hot dates.
All the recipes I tested from “On
Fire” were as described, and here is where the invisible hand of Mr. Mallmann’s
co-writer, Peter Kaminsky comes in. A real pro, Mr. Kaminsky co-wrote “Seven
Fires” as well and has contributed to many cookbooks. My only complaint about
the recipe writing is that often one of the ingredients is another recipe
altogether, like braised beans, that could take hours to make; or an ingredient
is relatively obscure, like pomegranate jelly, but no substitutions are
recommended. Such lapses simply reinforce the wise cookbook user’s credo: It’s
your own damn fault if you don’t read the whole recipe before beginning to
cook.
Although the number of recipes seems
scant, I found many that would make their way into my repertoire—more than in
many longer books I’ve read. I guess you pay extra for the high production
values: Honestly, the fervid, color-enhanced pictures of Mr. Mallmann’s utopian
Patagonian island retreat, his groovy scene in Uruguay and his swanky little
beach shack sometimes make the book feel like a giant advertorial. And maybe it
is: for Mr. Mallmann and his romance with food and life. Indeed, “On Fire”
calls for taking a more elemental, free-spirited approach to cooking, to revel
in nature, eat with abandon and find someone to nuzzle afterward.
Sounds good to me. And at $40 a pop,
it’s a lot cheaper than marriage counseling.
—Ms. Bone’s most recent book is “The Kitchen Ecosystem:
Integrating Recipes to Create Delicious Meals.”
Here’s some links on wood-fire cooking:
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