Argentinian Steak

[BBQPhil]

Just returned from 8 days in Buenos Aries and Mendoza with some friends to enjoy their steak and wine and see up close how the prep is done. Five great meals of steak over our visit. Every steak was noticeably better than anything I've ever experienced here, and I order from SRF, Creekstone, and have visited some great steak houses all over the US. .The meat was usually butter soft, very flavorful and had melt in your mouth texture. Cooking was done mostly over wood embers, not over flames, and done at temperatures of around 400F. They prefer low and slow to hot and fast. They burn the logs and let the embers accumulate under the grill, often taking 2 hours to prepare the fire. All the meat I had was dry aged and grass fed. Cost of the steaks in the best restaurants were less than half similar cost here. More to follow.

[BBQPhil]

[Mosca]

Yowza!

[theroc]

Time for a road trip!

[Greygoose]

Any online suppliers ?

[BBQPhil]

Been looking without success. Closest may be Piedmontese in the U.S.

[shify]

I loved all the steak i had in Argentina but my favorite was always the tira de asado which are flanken cut ribs. Would go back to Argentina in a second just to eat steak, chorizo, empanadas and drink some Malbec.

[Mosca]

Argentine and Chilean sausages are incredible.

[barelfly]

Those steaks don’t have the marbling like I expected to see from reading your first post, but the finished product sounds and looks amazing!

[Donw]

Most, but not all, Argentine beef is strictly grass fed.

[barelfly]

Donw - makes sense now, I didn’t think of that at first.

[JCBBQ]

We have an Argentinian butcher in Jersey City and all their meat comes from Uruguay. All grass fed too but incredibly delicious.

[Troutman]

Wow, I’m envious. What a great place for a culinary visit, they worship their meat down there. 👍

[Finster]

that's what she said

[Uncle Bob]

Next Meat Up?

[HawkerXP]

Nice! I miss the days when work took me to South America 2 to 3 times per year.

[BBQPhil]

Some other miscellaneous things:
1. For fire starters, they soak wine corks in cooking oil and ignite them with a small hand torch.
2. Seasoning with salt only and them use a chimichuri topping on the finished steak
3. Don’t use lump charcoal. Only embers created from the burning logs.
4. Fire temps moderate/high and cook longer rather than over flaming hot coals. Maybe 400-500F
5. No thermometers in sight anywhere

[Bkhuna]

Argentina is on my bucket list.

[JCBBQ]

Definitely

[LA Pork Butt]

What was the grate distance from the embers?

[Bob K]

We did this last year, same basic itinerary - BA for about a week, Mendoza about 5 nights.

Fantastic experience. Wonderful people, everywhere we went. Long flight but same time zone (or close), so it's not too rough. Prices were jaw-droppingly low. Of course that's largely due to their disastrous inflation situation - the US$ is like gold bullion there. (if you want to get a laugh, complain about our inflation here )

One night we were hosted by a guy, Pablo Bianchi,in BA that brands himself the "Beef Sommelier" - he cooked us several varieties of Argentinian beef on his asado in his back yard. Awesome guy, awesome night. Here he is (look him up if you make the trip):



As BBQPhil notes, it's generally a wood fire on a Santa Maria-like "asado" - they burn the wood down and manipulate the embers to adjust heat. LA Pork Butt - this should give you an idea of distance from embers - it's dependent on thickness of cut of course, but they seem to lean towards keeping the beef close to a relatively small ember base:

[yakima]

Grass fed questions. I am familiar with grain finished beef in midwest USA. I have read that in some countries grass finished beef is several years old. Is there an age standard in US? An 18 month old grass fed steer may be way different than a 30 month old. And it may not be fair to compare 18 month corn finished with 18 month grass finished.