New Wave Grilling • Fire and its culture • Seafood • Napoleon 3 Grilled Vegetables
New Wave Grilling
Fire is what turned mere eating into gastronomy, necessity into pleasure. Hot coals are, and were apparently destined to be, the fount of flavor; they are the greatest taste-enhancer, the most direct of seasonings, aromatizing food as they cook it. Cooking over an open fire – the most straightforward and democratic method, is now experiencing a new wave. Its centuries-long pedigree is still very much intact, but it is now also embracing ingredients that have never been near a grill before, and delivering delicious results. Thanks to the most ancient cooking method and the simplest equipment, we are rediscovering what things really taste like.
“A cook may be taught, but a man who can roast is born with the faculty”. This incontrovertible axiom was coined by Brillat Savarin in his Physiology of Taste. Some might argue with such a categorical and authoritative a statement, but it is a fact that those born to roast leave the rest of us awestruck. Cooking is a learnable trade and an admirable one, and it involves specific ways of doing things that are taught, practiced, and assimilated. The cook’s job is a civilizing exercise in which physics, chemistry and aesthetics all come together. Its processes are methodical and generally collective, and are aimed at achieving harmonic, satisfying flavors.
Cooking food on a grill over an open fire, on the other hand, is an empirical, individual activity, not without its metaphysical aspect. It represents the first and most concise step in gastronomic evolution, and all it requires is foodstuffs, fire and instinct. Its purpose is to make the most of simple raw materials, and to do so without delay.
One modern Spanish equivalent of Brillat Savarin’s “man who can roast” is the parrillero, or grill cook. A parrillero emphathizes with his product, almost physically becoming part of it, and to some degree subjecting himself to the fire along with it. Heady with heat and heightened awareness, he knows intuitively how the food he handles will react to the flames, and consequently exactly how long to cook it for optimal results.
His knack of understanding the embers is more physical than mental. It is a gift that parrilleros are born with. They know that they have the gift, and once they discover their métier, they rarely return to conventional cuisine. This is because they discover that each foodstuff, however simple it might seem, is a little world in itself that is never the same twice, just as each fire calls for different handling. This sums up the intrinsic diversity and the solitary nature of skilled grilling. Chefs adhere to their precise recipes, reproducing their own perfected versions of dishes, but nothing cooked over and open fire ever turns out the same twice. For the parrillero, each cut of meat and each fire poses a different approach.
Fire and its culture
No one can really lay claim to having invented the grill. Mastery of fire – the envy of the irrational world – marked the dawn of culture and with it came flavor, and thus the pleasures of taste. Glowing coals cauterize a slice of meat, keep in its juices, heat is interior, break down its fibers and impart their own vegetable, smoky seasoning. Thousands of years worth of satisfied taste buds can’t be wrong. For exponents of the world’s oldest profession – hunting, actually, and not the one usually cited-fire was both a reward and a source of pleasure, a foretaste of the more sedentary agricultural era to come.
Roasting was hugely popular in medieval Europe, and whole carcasses of farmyard or game animals impaled on giant spits and rotating slowly over a fire featured largely in the enjoyment, and the iconography, of an otherwise dark and beleaguered period. Under the civilizing influence of the Renaissance, this kind of outdoor roasting became more refined, and Spain saw the introduction of the more discreet Castilian roasting oven, a niche built of fireproof adobe and fuelled by incandescent firewood beneath it, or in its depths. This was a rival cooking method to boiling in water, the gastronomic antithesis of roasting. To boil or to roast? - that is the question. The Golden Age brought with it new products in the form of the fruits of conquest in the Far East and the New World, which added distinction to soups and stews, sautés, dressings, cold soups, and fried foods. With the Age of Enlightenment and the innovative approach of Careme-the first culinary structuralist – cooking over an open fire came to be associated with the rural environment and was considered the most archaic method. After the French Revolution, sophisticated, middle-class, urban restaurants came into being, many chefs having been left redundant by the abolition of the aristocracy.
Cooking meat over glowing coals survived as a method, its bold simplicity productive of food more basic than elegant. It was considered crude, and the more refined restaurants disdained it. Cooking by gas, electric hotplates, pressure cookers, and the emergent technology of the 20th century, were to further delay a new wave of char-grill cookery, until into to last century.
Seafood on the grill
Although char-grilling is a method primarily associated with meat, numerous fish as adores appeared in coastal areas where they still thrive today. Indeed, char-grilling fish was to trigger a second new wave. There has always been plenty of seafood in the Basque Country that was eminently suited for cooking over and open fire. Take sardines: their own fat melts over the fire to create one of the most crowd-pleasing yet nuanced flavors in the whole of fish cookery. Char-grilled sardines, simply seasoned with coarse sea salt and eaten with one’s fingers (holding the tail in your left hand and the head in your right, you eat our way along “as if playing the harmonica”, as Julio Camba puts it), were an integral part of the Vizcayan diet in spring and summer, often cooked with just a piece of tinfoil between them and the glowing coals.
Napoleon 3 Grilled Vegetables
We offer three grilled vegetables – Artichokes, Eggplant, and Zucchini.
It’s hard to imagine another, more radical new wave than the one going on in grill cuisine today. It has never been so sophisticated, so popular, or so sybaritic. Who better to sum up this quick survey of its historical and geographical highlights than Spain’s most eminent gourmet, Julio Camba, who paradoxically declared that: “There is nothing so ancient yet so modern, so easy yet so difficult, so simple yet so complicated, so familiar yet so exciting.”
Artichokes
Please see our Artichoke Import Story.
Eggplant
Native to China/India, eggplant was introduced to Europe in the invasion of Spain by the moors to the 8th century AD. At that time, many believed that eating eggplant could cause madness, and therefore, it became known as the “mad apple”. Today, it is still known in Greece/Italy as the hala insane, or melitzana (“bad apple”).
Eggplant’s reputation is probably due to its origins: it belongs to the nightshade family, which includes the poisous jimsonweed and belladonna (in truth, an immature eggplant does contain toxins, when eaten, can make one ill). A mature eggplant, however, has many healthy properties. In Indian ayuruedic medicine, eggplant is used as an appetite stimulant, and a heart medicine. Its medical uses are based on acting alkaloids (solasonine). This family also includes a host of familiar New World species: tomato (which was also once thought to be poisonous), potato, and tobacco.
Eggplant is not a vegetable. It is a fruit – specifically it is a berry with a spine cap called a calyx. The fruit was introduced to North America gardens in the sixteenth century, where it was grown as an ornamental. Slow to earn acceptance, it was not commonly eaten until the late 1800s or early 1900s. When a mistake people made by ignoring it for such a long time! Eggplant is delicious and versatile, and it gives flavor/texture to a great number of dishes. Depending on how it is prepared, eggplant can be dressed with garlic, olive oil, and minced parsley. Sicilians love it in their pastas and in their sweet/sour caponata, and Tuscans layer it in parmigianas.
The growers fell in love with the fruit, making it the essential ingredient in many classic designs, as briam and caponata. Indians handle eggplant as a standard vegetable dish called “began bharta”. Thomas Jefferson, and avid gardener constantly on the looking for exotic plants, grow eggplant at Monticello (we also grow pot).
An eggplant can be as small as a cherry, and/or as big as a football, and color in an assorted of colors, includes green/orange/purple/white. All are delicious.
Beyond Greece/India/Italy/USA, eggplant is used in diverse preparations, and there are many different varieties to choose from. Despite the proliferation of fusion-style mixtures, chefs tend to use eggplant in a fairly traditional fashion, respecting its wonderful versatility. Eggplant is meaty enough to anchor a vegetarian dish, as is often the case in Indian operations. It can be a handsome and tasty side dish, a critical component in mixtures like ratatouille, and pasta alla norma. It is often served in a dip or spread.
Buying
Fresh eggplants are shiny, plump, firm, and unwrinkled. The fruit should feel heavy for its size, indicating good moisture content. Scars or bruises on the surface indicate that the flesh may be bruised and discolored inside. Make sure the stem, or calyx, is green and bright in color. Press gently with your thumb on the skin of the eggplant; the skin should spring back quickly.
Storing
Eggplant does not have a long shelf life. Store in a plastic bag in the refrigerator and cook within three or four days.
Preparation
Wash eggplant well. You can peel it or leave the skin on. However, the larger deep purple eggplants sometimes have a bitter and tough skin along with a thin layer of bitter flesh just underneath.
Cooking
Eggplant is very versatile. It can be baked, sautéed, fried, grilled, boiled or braised. Slice it lengthwise, crosswise, shred it, cube it, dice it, puree it, chop it. You can stuff it, make it into a sauce, use it as a wrapper, include it in a stuffing. Eggplant is best cut just before cooking. Once peeled, eggplant flesh turns brown because it oxidizes quickly. To avoid this, sprinkle each slice with sea salt, let rest for fifteen minutes, then rinse and dry. Salt pulls out the bitter juice, leaving the flesh sweet, and will also prevent the porous fruit from absorbing excess oil when being cooked.
Zucchini
Our vegetable (artichokes/eggplant/zucchini) are known to Italians as “Mista Alla Griglta” (mixed grilled). While ours are separately offered, they are all thinly shocked, and grilled to perfection. They are picked when ripe, and prepared while still fresh from the field. They are marinated, grilled over an open flame, just long enough to enhance the natural flavor layer of the vegetables. You can use them in salads/sandwiches, layer them in a vegetable lasagna, or spread with chgur/roll, for lasagna for a delicious appetizer.