Cuisine

Argentine

Asado is a fire discipline before it is a steak on a plate. Beef is cooked over wood or charcoal at a distance that renders fat without burning the surface, then sliced and eaten with a sharp, oily herb sauce. Chimichurri is parsley, oregano, garlic, chilli, vinegar and oil — a raw sauce, not a cooked gravy. Steak with chimichurri is the simple export of that table. Beef empanadas are a different craft: a wheat pastry folded around spiced mince, olives, egg or potato, baked or fried so the juice stays in. The two plates share beef and little else in technique.

Cattle on the pampas, Spanish pastry and Italian immigration produced a grill-and-wheat kitchen. Asado as a social fire is older as a practice than any restaurant steak. Chimichurri's exact origin stories are messy; the useful fact is the raw herb-and-vinegar cut against fat. Empanadas have Andalusian and wider Latin American cousins; the Argentine filling is often beef with cumin and a raisin or olive sweetness. Italian pasta and pizza are now Argentine urban food.

Salt the meat; do not bury it in marinade. Chimichurri should be loose enough to spoon and sharp enough to cut the fat. Empanada dough must seal; a leak is a failed fold. Cumin and paprika season the mince. Argentine cooking overlaps Chilean baking and Uruguayan grill and then leans harder on beef. It is not Brazilian churrasco with a different name, and it is not Mexican chilli-and-masa cooking. Fire, parsley, vinegar and a sealed pastry are the methods.