Parrilla

While my castellano (the type of spanish Argentine speaks) is improving at a turtle-speed and still very far away from being fluent, I figured that I need to do something else to add onto my Argentinism. I had the pleasure of being invited to someone's house and they have a built-in parrilla there! And of course, we had bbq meat. yummmm... Anyway, even it was only by observation, now I know how to prepare a parrilla for asado and how to clean it. Here are what need to be done...

To start, you put big pieces of coals on the wire shelf on the side and put newspapers, woods or what not underneath to get a fire going. Once the coals started to burn, they'd break down into smaller pieces and you'd spread them evenly at the bottom of the grill. That would take some time and patience so that you can warm up the grill real good for the main event.

When the coals are all white and hot, nicely mattressed underneath the wire grill, it's time to bring in the meat! I don't think they really marinated the meat other than sprinkled them with some salt; which I think it's because the natural taste of the Argentine meat is flavorful enough. So that day, we had chorizo (pork sausage), asado de tira (beef ribs) and chuleta de cerdo (porkchop), as seen in pic.

To serve them, we put them in a little grill which is called parrillada. We actually put burning hot coals on bottom layer to keep the food fresh and hot. It was reeeallly hot to handle, gotta watch it. You can actually order parrillada in the steak house too, that's definitely something one should try since they put all kinds of meat on it and you'll get to try different cut of meat and parts of the cow, and yes, that include organs.

I did learn how to clean the parrilla but cleaning is never fun to talk about so I'm just gonna skip that. Buen provecho! (Bon appétit!)