Beef: Asado & Parilla

One of the things that Argentina is most famous for is its beef. I’m not that sure I can speak to its quality here as I don’t eat enough of it (here or in the states) to be able to tell the difference. But it is certainly good, and moreover it’s plentiful and cheap. The cuts of beef are different from in the US and the most common are bife de lomo – sirloin strips – and bife de chorizo – sirloin or rump. Most typical restaurants serve these two cuts off the grill (usually with french fries), as well as a smaller steak sandwich and sometimes kebob-type option.

For a true Argentine beef experience, however, you would not go to any old restaurant but to a parilla (puh-REE-sha; double ell in Argentina is pronounced “sh”) – a restaurant that specializes in grilled meat – or to an asado, a typical barbecue that is most often with the family on a Sunday afternoon.

At a parilla, although your only choice, pretty much, is meat, and it’s all cooked the same way on the grill, you have a lot of types and cuts of meat to choose from. One thing that is common is for the parilla (that’s also what you call the meal) to be a service for two people with a sample of cuts, a few sauces, and a choice of side dish. I went to a fairly nice parilla a few weeks ago with Eve and Cruz and their friend Ingrid, and between the four of us we shared an appetizer platter and two dinner platters. The appetizer was an assortment of entrails: kidneys, intestines, sweetbreads, blood sausage and also regular sausage or chorizo. I didn’t like eating the intestines because they were too rubbery, but the insides are soft and taste like marrow. The blood sausage here has a nice flavor (if you like that sort of thing, which most people don’t but I do!) but instead of being hard like a normal sausage and other blood sausage that I’ve had, it has a texture inside the casing that can really only be described as gloopy. I think it could be nice spread on bread, but eating it plain can be kind of gross, especially since it is studded with pieces of fat (which in a normal sausage are consistent with the texture but not in this). After the appetizer we got the side dishes that come with the main course, mashed potatoes and salad. Eve says Argentines always eat salad with parilla to make the meat easier to digest, but considering how small the portion of salad was, and how much meat we ate, the notion is pretty much ridiculous. For the main course we had one standard platter, which included the lomo and chorizo cuts as well as ribs, cut across the bone in one or two inch pieces, and some other cuts that I don’t remember. For our second platter we got an assortment of game, which included wild boar, goat, lamb, and venison. All the platters come with a few sauces including chimichurri, the most traditional sauce made with garlic, oil, oregano, parsley, pepper and paprika. We also had one that was just parsley and garlic, and a honey mustard sauce for the game. The meat was really juicy (partly because it had butter on top, yum) and had nice flavor from being grilled, so I actually didn’t use very much sauce (also because I was going dancing afterwards and didn’t want the garlic on my breath). The only thing to drink with parilla is, of course, red wine, and we had a bottle of local malbec and a cup of coffee afterwards. All together, we spent 200 pesos on dinner, which comes to less than 20 bucks a person. Not bad.

I’m a little bit confused about how the terminology works, but I think that the food at a parilla is cooked on an asado (grill), the same as you would have at a family asado (barbecue). (There’s also, I believe, a cut of beef called asado.) So the difference is less in the food and more in the setting. I would love to be able to go to a real family asado sometime, but I think for that to happen I have to find an argentine boyfriend or something.

the asado at Luz's house; click for more pictures

However, last Thursday night one of the teachers at my Spanish school had an asado at her house for all the students and teachers at the school. Everyone contributed ten pesos towards ingredients, and brought something to drink as well. Luz’ house is in a pretty industrial and somewhat unsavory area, and I was actually pretty sketched out heading over there, but because of the area they own their own house. It’s a really cool one because the rooms all open onto an outdoor courtyard which also serves as the dining room, and where we had the asado. The walls of the courtyard have vines growing up them, and there’s also a staircase leading up to a terrace on the roof of the house. There were about 20 people at the asado and they’d pushed together three or four tables. When I arrived the tables were covered with baskets of bread, bowls of lettuce and sliced tomatos, and a big tray of boiled potatos sliced and sprinkled with fresh mint. When everyone arrived, the hostess and one of the other teachers brought around tray after tray from the grill starting with choripan, followed by blood sausage, two cuts of beef, pork, and finally corn. For desert I helped Luz arrange slices of apple and slices of ice cream (that had been purchased as a log) on a tray, sprinkled with walnuts and drizzled with warm chocolate sauce made from chocolate, cream, and dulce de leche. I didn’t think I had room in my stomach after the barbecue but somehow I managed to eat a helping of dessert as well. And then a second one.

Buenos Aires is a very European-feeling city, and I think this asado was the first time since being here that I really felt like I was in South America. The warm night air, the dimly lit, vine covered courtyard, the strains of cumbia music coming from the living room, and the general hospitality of my teacher and her husband also made it one of the most pleasant evenings I’ve spent here.

Choripan

Choripan is sausage (chorizo) with bread (pan). Chorizo (the sausage) is a coarse pork sausage unrelated to bife de chorizo (a cut of beef from the rump or sirloin). It’s also different from the Mexican chorizo that you can get in the US. Each sausage is about the size of an Italian sausage; about 4 or 5 inches long and an inch in diameter. It’s either pre-cooked or smoked, I’m not sure, and is the same reddish color of Mexican chorizo or pepperoni, but it’s not at all spicy (in fact, nothing eaten in Argentina is spicy. If someone tells you that something is spicy, it’s most likely to have a lot of raw garlic in it, rather than something peppery or horseradishy). Choripan, then, is bread with this type of sausage on it, usually grilled and sliced in half lengthwise. It is the Argentine answer to a hot dog in a bun (although those, called panchos, are pretty ubiquitous as well), and is what you would get if you went to a soccer game.

Punta del Este, Uruguay

Last weekend I went with my roommate to Uruguay, to a beach town called Punta del Este. Buenos Aires is right across the water from Uruguay and there are ferries that you can take to Montevideo, the capital, and a town called Colonia, Uruguay’s oldest town. We went to Colonia and then took a 4 hour bus ride to Punta del Este. It’s a pretty small town, with a peninsula stretching south that is about 4 or 5 city blocks wide and maybe 30 long. This picture is the view from our hotel window, you can see how close the ocean is on both sides (the panorama looks curved but that’s just the camera angle). There are beaches on either side, one side faces a bay and is calmer and the beaches emptier, the other side faces the open sea and has decent waves and a lot more people, mostly a bit older than us and some quite old with skins like leather, as if they’d spent their lives (sunscreen-free) on that beach. The town had a bunch of tourists, mostly from Brazil as far as I can tell. I’m not sure why, I think there are probably much better beaches in Brazil, but whatever.

We didn’t do much all weekend, just sat on the beach or in cafes, reading and sleeping. We had been told that it was Carnaval weekend but couldn’t really find any reference to it, which was disappointing. Also disappointing was that it rained every night we were there; it was sunny for enough of the daytime to sit on the beach for a while (longer than my capacity for sitting in the sun anyway). All in all, though, it was a really calm, relaxing weekend; in Buenos Aires there is so much to see and do and new places to try, and it was so nice to be in a small town.

Tigre & the Parana Delta

First of all, my slow internet connection is making it hard to put images in this blog, so you can see some of my pictures on flickr. About half of them right now are from Tigre.

Sunday I took the train to Tigre, a town about an hour from Buenos Aires, situated on an island in the Parana delta (well, everything’s an island there because the land is divided by canals). I went with Bright and two people that we’d met in a tango class the day before; I’d been wanting to get out of the city but didn’t know where to go, and they’d already been thinking about going here and invited us along.

I went into it kind of blind; I just knew that there would be more water and fewer cars and that was enough of a reason to go. It turns out it’s the thing to do on the weekends; porteños (Buenos Aires natives) flee the city by the tens of thousands on the weekends to have asados (barbecues) with their families and breathe the fresher air of the countryside. There are two train routes to Tigre and also two bus lines; the one we took left every 20 minutes and was packed (standing room only, and not much of that); I estimated there must have been over a thousand people on the 11:20 train alone.

Upon arrival in the city, (which seemed pleasant and manageable and I’d like to go and actually see it someday) people board one of several boat-buses that navigate the canals—or if they are there to visit family, may be picked up in their family’s motorboat. We took one of the boat buses for an hour upstream, past endless green lawns, and a few sandy beaches, covered with sun bathers, children playing in the water, and families having barbecues. The houses along the river are all on stilts in case of flooding, but these are not rickety wooden structures; if you took off the stilts they’d blend right into my neighborhood in Berkeley. The water itself is the color of milk chocolate, because of iron in the soil all around, and is actually quite clean. It’s used for recreation as well as transportation, and we passed many people in rowboats, kayaks, sea-doos and motorboats (sometimes with water-skiers in tow).

Since we didn’t have a barbecue to go to, we got off the boat at an inn that had restaurant with tables on the lawn looking at the river. Most restaurants here are pretty laid back and don’t mind if you stay for a while, so we just sat for a few hours and had a couple of beers before taking the boat back to Tigre.

Coffee

Coffee here is much stronger and comes in much smaller doses, as is more common in Europe I guess. (Ok, well in this picture I'd ordered a "Lagrima" which turned out to be 3 parts milk to one part coffee, but normally you get something darker!) You also almost always get it in sit down cafes, rather than order-at-the-counter places. It can be quite a production, because not only do they bring you the coffee in a glass on a saucer and a separate saucer with sugar packets, there is often a small cookie or piece of chocolate on the side, and depending on the restaurant and kind of coffee you get, it usually comes with a small glass of water. In this picture there's also some other desert thing that I got, called rogel, which is layers of pastry and dulce de leche, with lemon icing. Muy rico!
It's pretty hard to get coffee to-go; sometimes if you do it means it comes in a disposable styrofoam cup, but the lid doesn't have a place to sip from; they expect you to drink it at your destination rather than while walking. I found my first "cafe frio" on a menu today and was really excited because I really crave iced coffee when it's hot out (especially if I have to go somewhere in the morning after being out the night before). But it turned out to just be room-temperature coffee in a mug. It was a little disappointing.

This isn't really related to coffee, but this picture is from the same day as the above. The cafe was sort of overrun by pigeons, which I hadn't noticed when I sat down, but they were everywhere and quite aggressive. While I was trying to do my Spanish homework they kept hopping onto the chair across from me, and then right on my table! When the people at the table behind me left, the pigeons instantly descended on the remaining food, which was some sort of chocolate ice cream or mousse pie with whipped cream; when the waiter scattered the pigeons away they had goo all over their feet, which they then tracked all over the ground and left on the backs of chairs in the cafe. Gross!