| | |  Entertainment | Restaurants & Dining | May 2009 
Grilling Over Wood as a Sweaty, Smoky Sport
 Oliver Schwaner-Albright - New York Times
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| | (Jennifer May/NYT) | |
Grilling over a wood fire is as much a sport as an art — it’s more instinctive than cooking with a gas grill, more nuanced than cooking with charcoal, and more athletic than both.
In my experience it’s also more satisfying, and not just when a platter of grilled lamb or a slab of crispy glazed pork belly is brought to the table still smelling of oak and applewood. It’s the theater of building a fire out of split logs, and cooking over it. It’s steaming open clams in a caldron set directly on the flames, or charring fennel on a cast-iron griddle, or lowering a grill over a shallow pile of glowing coals for a steak gently seared to medium-rare. Grilling over hardwood is sweaty, smoky, eye-stinging work, but it’s fun.
Every Memorial Day, when I grill in a primitive fire pit made out of stacked rocks, one friend repeats the same awed phrase: “Dude, this is like Argentina.”
Not quite. If we were in Argentina, I would draft my friends to help me grill a whole cow, which is one of the recipes in “Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way” (Artisan, 2009) by Francis Mallmann, the chef and owner of Patagonia Sur, the celebrated Buenos Aires restaurant, and Peter Kaminsky, the Brooklyn-based writer. (The first ingredient is “1 medium cow, about 1,400 pounds, butterflied, skin removed.”)
Not all of the recipes in “Seven Fires” call for a pulley. While some of the dishes are the sort of gonzo cooking sure to be documented, mid-flame, on Twitter (pork leg buried in salt, lamb roasted in a wheelbarrow), most of what’s in this captivating book about cooking over wood is as straightforward as it is appealing. Take the oranges and rosemary sprinkled with sugar and caramelized on a cast-iron skillet. The charred, sugary rosemary is both rough and refined, a gratifying end to a grilled meal.
A wide cast-iron griddle, like the ones from Lodge (lodgemfg.com), heats exceptionally well over an open flame. Along with long-handled tongs, fire-resistant gloves, an instant-read thermometer and a broad stainless steel spackle knife from a hardware store (narrower and stronger than most spatulas), it’s one of the basic tools for grilling over wood.
But the most essential piece of equipment is an adjustable cast-iron grill. The grill fits into a freestanding bracket, and can be raised well above the flames or lowered until it kisses the coals.
Mr. Kaminsky, who has written about food and the outdoors for The New York Times, has a fairly elaborate setup in the yard of his Cobble Hill brownstone. In addition to an adjustable grill, he has two Tuscan grills (like the adjustable grills, these are available at spitjack.com), heavy cast-iron grates on four-inch legs. He also had a local wrought-iron shop fabricate an Argentine infiernillo, which looks like a pair of stacked metal coffee tables and works like an open-air oven: you start a fire under one and on top of the other, and roast food between the two.
But to cook Mr. Mallmann’s trademark rib-eye, modestly called “A Perfect Steak,” all you need is medium-high heat, with a grill set about two inches above the embers. I joined Mr. Kaminsky in his backyard, where he explained the technique: patience. The one-and-a-half-inch-thick rib-eye was cooked for nine minutes on one side, then seven minutes on the other, timed on an iPhone. Mr. Kaminsky hardly touched it, rotating it 45 degrees on each side, and flipping it only once.
“You want to get that nice crust, so you want it hot, and you don’t want to mess with it,” Mr. Kaminsky said. “The idea is to get it pink all the way through, with none of that well-done gray part around the edge.”
It seemed like a long time to cook a steak, but when he cut it open it was rosé-red, juicy and delicious. Indeed, it was a perfect steak.
And Mr. Kaminsky demonstrated perfect technique. He stacked split pieces of well-seasoned, thoroughly dry oak, and started a fire using some newspaper and fatwood, a resinous pinewood that flames easily. (Pine is fine for starting fires, but because it burns quickly and imparts an acrid flavor it should never be used for cooking.) Mr. Kaminsky used a fireplace shovel and a poker modified so that it looked like a croupier’s rake to gather the hot embers, carefully placing them under the grill, adding more oak to the fire as the wood turned into embers.
But at its most basic, grilling over hardwood is campfire cooking. My backyard cooking falls somewhere between Mr. Kaminsky’s control and a campfire’s chaos. I’ll ignite oak and applewood in a fire pit, and while the flames are still burning I’ll heat a griddle for searing vegetables for a salad (sliced fennel, tomato halves and wedges of radicchio all char nicely). Or I’ll put clams, white wine and herbs in a cast iron caldron and set it directly on the burning wood, then toast some bread for a simple appetizer. Once the wood turns into hot embers — between 20 and 30 minutes — it’s ready for grilling.
Because a wood fire can be much hotter than what you’ll get from charcoal or gas, you should use canola oil or another neutral-flavored oil with a high smoke point for seasoning the grill and griddle or for brushing meat, fish and vegetables. Olive oil, which breaks down over high heat, can be drizzled on later, for flavor.
Wood fire might seem to have a greater environmental impact than charcoal or gas, but it’s not so easily assessed. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, a wood fire emits more gases and particulate matter than clean-burning propane, but it also has a smaller carbon footprint. The E.P.A. does not endorse one form of grilling over another.
That smoke is a guilty pleasure. It gives so much flavor, it makes most marinades and rubs unnecessary. But a bright and balanced sauce, like the honey-sweetened gremolata in “Seven Fires,” adds a note of sophistication.
So does the fresh dried chili oil from Russell Moore, the chef and an owner of Camino, in Oakland, Calif., a restaurant where almost everything is cooked with a wood fire. This time of year Mr. Moore grills asparagus and spring onions, then tops them with a chili oil he makes from mild dried New Mexican chilies, pounded garlic and chopped mint. The result has so much body and flavor it’s more salsa than sauce. Mr. Moore describes it as “a super-rough harissa.”
The recipe is really a template — you can use any mild chili, such as chihuacle or mulatto, and any herb — and drizzle it over whatever vegetable looks good that week, from artichokes to new potatoes to escarole to summer chanterelles. “You want all the freshness of the seasons in there, and three strong flavors,” Mr. Moore said.
Many of the dishes in Adam Perry Lang’s “Serious Barbecue” (Hyperion, 2009) call for indirect heat — this could become a bible for disciples of the ceramic outdoor cooker known as the Big Green Egg — but some dishes, like his Crisp and Unctuous Pork Belly, do just as well when braised in a conventional oven and finished on the grill. Mr. Lang, the chef and owner of Daisy May’s BBQ in Manhattan, builds flavor whenever possible, and the pork belly calls for a marinade, a bourbon glaze (preferably applied with a bundle of herbs), and a dressing applied directly to the cutting board: you squeeze lemon on the board and add olive oil, chives and pepper, so that the resting slab of pork draws in even more flavor.
Mr. Lang suggests serving slices of the belly in a bun with applesauce and mustard, the latest iteration of the pork bun. It’s also good on watercress or arugula, tossed with a sharp dressing.
For all the technique he details in the book, when I spoke to Mr. Lang he drove home one point: Never use a spray bottle to douse flares from dripping fat. Instead, he suggests moving the food to a cooler corner of the grill, or stacking meat so that it’s exposed to less heat. “A lot of people fear the flame,” Mr. Lang said. “I tell them: Don’t. Because when you’re cooking on wood the flavor is like nothing else.” |
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