Beef It Up

Whatever you hear about the barbecued beef in Argentina is all true. In a nation where the average beef consumption per person is a whopping 143 pounds per year, it's not only a dietary staple, it's a cultural staple as well. The beef and cattle industry is one of the largest in the country, and beef is one of Argentina's top exports. Beef, quite simply, is a way of life.

Parillas - the asada (barbecue) restaurants - are more frequent than coffee shops in Seattle. The smell of meat cooking over an open flame permeates the air; the heat from open barbecue grills blasts onto the sidewalks in every corner of every neighborhood. It's all generated from wood-burning grills - there are no spare the air days here - and the experience of dining at a parilla is one not to be missed.


Over the course of my days in Argentina, I attempted to try as many of the varied cuts of meat at a parilla as I could. That included the offal, and meats other than beef. Who knows if/when I'll ever make it back there, so I wanted to dive in and try it all. And I was itching to get started - so I picked a local parilla for our group to have lunch on our very first day in town (El Desnival in San Telmo). I thought I was prepared - I had read up on the various cuts of meat, the asado terminology, the dishes I might encounter - and I confidently ordered the filet listed on the handwritten sheet of the daily specials. Silly me. I should have brought a cheat sheet. What arrived certainly was not a filet cut of beef. For that, I should have ordered the bife de lomo. What I got instead of the juicy steak I had intended to order was a deep fried filet of fish. Wa-wa-wahhh..... Day one, and my first asado failure. Thankfully, it was to be my last.

In the weeks that followed, I did get my bife de lomo (fabulous), and tried a whole roster of other cuts and parts as well:

• Asado de tira (rack of ribs)
• Bife de costilla (T-bone)
• Entraña (skirt steak)
• Mollejas (sweetbreads, or the thymus glad of the cow)
• Morcilla (blood sausage)
• Chorizo (pork sausage)
• Ojo de bife (eye of round steak)
• Tripa (tripe - intestines)
• Chivito (kid goat)
• Pollo (chicken)

Certain cuts I liked more than others (the lomo and the entraña were my favorites), but I'm proud of myself for giving all the other parts a try. I didn't mind the tripa, and actually loved the mollejas. The kid goat was delicious as well, even though it was more overcooked than I would have preferred (cooking meat until its well done is the Argentine way). The meat would arrive without adornment - it probably hadn't even seen a sprinkling of salt. So, I would dutifully salt my meat, and in most cases, that was all the seasoning that was necessary to let the juicy, smoky, beefy flavor shine through.




But what about the chimichurri sauce for the steaks? The piquant sauce made of herbs, oil and vinegar that supposedly is as ubiquitous in Argentina as ketchup is here? In most cases, you actually had to ask for it, but when you did and you could get it, it was divine. When I could get my hands on it, I poured it on everything. It was SO good, and yes, it made a great condiment for the steaks. And the chicken. And the potatoes. Anything, really. There's a misperception that chimichurri needs to be a verdant, bright green sauce, when that couldn't be further from the truth. Some of the very best chimichurris I had were a deep red in color because they had been let to stand and age. My mouth waters just thinking of it now. Stay tuned to Fare to Remember for my attempts to make it at home.