And the flame is not the point – the ember is, and the difference between the two is the whole of good grilling
Ember Yard holds a 4.7 from two thousand seven hundred and fifty-one people, charges twenty to sixty pounds, and everything comes off a wood and charcoal grill.
And the distinction in the name is the entire craft.
Flame is bad
This is the thing that almost every domestic barbecue in Britain gets wrong, every summer, on a Saturday.
A flame is a chemical reaction happening in the air above the fuel. It is hot, it is unpredictable, it is uneven, and it deposits soot – and food held in a flame is not being cooked, it is being carbonised on the outside while remaining raw in the middle.
Every burnt sausage in this country is a flame problem.
And the smoke from a flame is the wrong smoke. Incomplete combustion produces acrid, bitter compounds, and they go straight onto the meat, and that is why a badly-run barbecue tastes of petrol.
The ember is good
An ember is fuel that has finished flaming and is now glowing.
It radiates heat, steadily, in the infrared – and infrared cooks by radiation rather than by convection, which means it penetrates rather than merely searing, and it does so evenly and controllably.
And the smoke coming off a proper ember bed is clean – thin, blue, almost invisible – and it deposits the compounds you actually want.
Which is why every serious grill cook in the world builds the fire in one place and cooks somewhere else. You burn the wood down, you rake the embers under the grill, and you keep feeding the fire at the side.
The Spanish call the room the asador. The Basques have made an entire cuisine of it. And the Argentine asado, which we wrote about at Gaucho, is the same principle: embers, time, salt, and nothing else.
Why it took us so long
Because Britain, for about forty years, cooked outdoors on gas.
And gas is a flame. It is convenient, it is instant, it is controllable, and it produces none of the radiant heat and none of the smoke that make fire cooking worth doing.
We spent two generations grilling over a burner and concluding that barbecue was overrated.
Which is the finding, again
Five postcodes, and the constraint keeps making the art.
Port fortified for a boat. Hops added as a preservative. Smoking meat to survive February. The SP-1200’s twelve-bit limitation that became an aesthetic. Boom bap. The blues, built by people improvising with nothing written down.
Nobody sets out to invent a beautiful thing.
Verdict
Superb. Order the pork, order the octopus, sit at the counter.
The Maillard reaction
Which is the actual chemistry and which is worth knowing, because it explains every good thing you have ever eaten.
Above roughly a hundred and forty degrees, amino acids and sugars in food react with each other and produce several hundred new compounds – and those compounds are, collectively, what browning tastes like.
Bread crust. Roast meat. Coffee. Chocolate. Fried onions. Beer, which we wrote about at Ain’t Nothin’ But, because the malt is roasted.
It is not caramelisation, which is sugar alone. It is a different and much more complicated reaction, and it was described by a French physician in 1912 who was not thinking about food at all.
Everything delicious is a chemical reaction that somebody stumbled into while looking for something else.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
Esto es lo que ocurre cuando vives en un sitio en vez de limitarte a consumirlo por internet.