Pleased to Meat You

I stole that pun from Jono Bush from the awesome Bush's Meats who I know from my days of sailing with Vanguard from the CYC, in Sydney. The full line goes: "Pleased to meat you. I have the meat to please you". Classic. 

Anyway.. I thought I'd write a little bit about the meat over here because it kindof dominates every menu, supermarket, fridge, diet, day etc etc.

For the past 20 years, Argentina has averaged consumption of 100kg of beef per capita per year. Carne is actually the word for meat generally (butchers are called Carniceria), but if it says carne.. 99% of the time, it is actually beef. Pork is consumed in much smaller quantities.. usually in the form of chorizos and bondiolas which is a kind of rolled, cured pork.. or as jamon (ham) and jamon crudo (proscuitto). Outside of Buenos Aires, towards Patagonia, it is more common to see Lamb and Goat. Anyway.. I'm mostly going to write about beef.  My Spanish teacher tells me the meat is so good and so cheap here, it has had the negative consequence that Argentinians are really uninteresting cooks. They'll just cook/eat meat. And they'll cook/eat it in the same way. Grilled.

To eat meat you either go to a Parilla (in buenos aires, pronounced pareesha, but in the rest of the spanish-speaking world, pronounced pareeya) or you hope you are invited to an argentinian asado (more on asados in a bit). 

Parilla is the name given to the grill the meat is placed on, but it is also used to describe restaurants that specialise in grilled meat. There is really no shortage of these in BA. You'll find at least one on every street. A typical lunch here (for portenos) is Bife de Chorizo con papas fritas. Steak and chips. Many Parillas do a lunch special around 40 pesos for this (about $10). The higher end steak restaurants sell their steak for closer to 50/60 + pesos not including sides. This price has apparently climbed quite rapidly over the past few years (as with everything here). Still. If you are into meat, Buenos Aires is pretty good value. And the quality is amazing. At a parilla it is customary to begin with some empanadas (little pasties filled with meat or corn or ham or cheese) and maybe proveleta - grilled provelone cheese with dried spices. You would then eat your offal - chitterlunes (the beginning part of the small intestine), morchilla (blood sausage), mollejas (sweetbreads or thylmas glands), chorizo (the pork sausage).. before moving onto the main event: the beef. 

There are about 10 different cuts of beef that you'll see on every menu. A lot of the time the names and descriptions are pretty different from what we are use to on Australian menus. I'm not going to write about them all but the most popular are probably the Bife de Chorizo, Bife de Lomo, Bife de Ojo, Metambre and Asado.

Bife de Chorizo has nothing to do with sausages. Or pork. It is sirloin and the closest thing to a New York strip. Order it at an expensive restaurant and it will be pretty amazing. The fat is a gorgeous yellow colour (grass-fed). In cheaper restaurants it will still be tasty but it will probably come with a heap of fat, and probably gristle. Lomo is tenderloin. It's usually the most expensive and is very tender. But is it is really lean, so not a lot of that fatty flavour that I like in my meat.

Asado is the word for BBQ, but on a menu at a parilla it refers to a cut that is like a tasty meaty-part sandwiched between some boney parts. Hmm.. I'm going to look up the technical name now.. oh apparently the boney bits are the ribs. The definition thing said it is chuck ribs, flank style. Not sure what that is but it is really tasty. And really popular at asados. Bife de ojo is eye fillet. Yawn. I really like Metambre which is a long thin cut that they take from just under the skin so it is nicely fatty. It runs from the beneath the ribs to the belly. When my friend Jen cooked it for us, she folded it in half so there was fat either side of the meat. All those fatty juices were cooked in. So good! Entrana - (skirt steak) can be pretty good, Bife de Costilla is a T Bone and pretty darn yum too. 

La Brigada and La Cabrera fight it out for the gringos guide to BA parillas top billing. La Brigada do the gimmick thing of cutting the steak with a spoon. La Cabrera have happy hour where the entire bill is 50% off if you arrive before 7pm. I like the feel of the neighbourhood parillas though. Less tourists clutching their timeout/lonely planet.. less formality.. and often more fun. The steaks and service aren't the same quality though..

Asados however, are the best! You'll be invited around about 9.30pm. My argentinian friends tell me that it is rude in argentina to arrive on time. If you say 9.30, you really want people to arrive at 10pm. If you actually arrive at the stipulated time, the host will freak out. Except if she/he is an expat. Or knows that you are. Anyway.. you eat the same things as above.. except you get to participate in the ritual of watching the meat bbq. There's something so australian about standing around and watching meat cook. And smelling it cook. Everywhere sells the necessary coals and timber. And when you buy it, you also ask for the wooden crate.. which you use to elevate the coals while they cook down. I think.

Anyway.. the meat is arranged in a beautiful, carnivorous collage on the grill. No marinating. No fancy sauces. Just meat and a lot of salt.  Once cooked, you can add Chimichurri sauce. A sauce of parsely, lemon and oil. Some places add a bit of chilli but this isn't really to argentines' tastes. At a recent asado I received a heap of strange looks from the argentinians when I kept loading the chimichurri onto my meat. I was enjoying the fact that this version had chillis in it. They couldn't believe I could handle the quantities of, to be fair, extremely mild sauce. Eventually it earned me the nickname of Chimichurri. Hey. I like it spicy.

I'll whack some photos up soon. I'll also write something soon about food that isn't meat. For those occasions I stray from the meaten path (haha).