For These Chefs, Even Fire Can Be Improved
By STEVEN RAICHLEN
International Herald Tribune

THE first thing you see on entering Elckerlijc, Peter De Clercq's
restaurant in Maldegem, Belgium, is a massive grill spewing sparks like
a blast furnace in the open kitchen. But what you smell is more than
just smoldering oak, apple or cherry wood.

Mr. De Clercq tosses handfuls of what he calls fire spice -- a blend of
coriander seed, juniper berries, peppercorns, rosemary and other herbs
-- onto the embers to generate fragrant blasts of spice smoke. He'll
also throw in olive pits from Portugal (excellent for grilling veal, he
says) and chips from barrels of kriek, Belgian cherry beer, well suited
to poultry and pork.

"In a sense, grilling is a monolithic cooking method, producing a
similar taste in everything you cook over the fire," Mr. De Clercq said.
"We look to differentiate each dish by spicing not just the meat, but
the fire."

Victor Arguinzoniz, the chef-owner of Etxebarri in the hilly Basque
countryside between San Sebastián and Bilbao, Spain, prefers to tame,
not flavor, the fire. He cooks the most delicate foods imaginable on
calibrated grills over small mounds of embers measured almost to the
coal.

The grill's very unpredictability is what appeals to the chef Pascal
Bardet at Alain Ducasse's Louis XV, at the Hotel de Paris in Monaco. And
at the experimental restaurants Moto and iNG in Chicago, the grill ranks
up there with the liquid nitrogen immersion tank as a tool for
innovation.

As burgers and steaks are being flipped on backyard grills all across
the United States this weekend, some of the world's top chefs are
finding sophisticated new ways of handling this ancient, elemental
cooking method. They are among a new generation of grill masters whose
revolutionary techniques are redefining the very notion of grilling.

Mr. De Clercq found his passion for live-fire cooking early. At 14 he
grilled sausages at street fairs in the Belgian seaside town of
Knokke-Heist. Since then, he has written Belgium's first barbecue book
and won the World Barbecue Championship in 2003, and now he hosts
grilling shows on Belgian television.

Founded as a simple chop house in 1990, Elckerlijc has evolved into a
stylish 100-seat restaurant that draws patrons from all over Europe.
Now, as then, the wood ember-fueled grill remains the restaurant's focal
point.

"Charcoal has the taste burned out of it," Mr. De Clercq, 41, said. "You
can't beat the flavor of wood."

Belgium does not have a grilling tradition. So Mr. De Clercq set out to
create one. He grills haricots verts wrapped in smoky local Breydel
bacon. He simmers kriek beer to make a cherry-flavored teriyaki glaze.
Belgium's beloved mussels come grilled with herbs and wine in a "Q bag"
-- a sort of foil papillote that Mr. De Clercq designed for
steam-grilling. For dessert he grills Belgian nougat on long, slender
skewers -- the Flemish version of a s'more.

Nobody needs to invent a grilling tradition in Spain, where the asador,
or grill master, has long been a fixture in kitchens.

"I grew up in a home without gas or electricity," Mr. Arguinzoniz, 51,
said. "My grandmother did all her cooking on a wood-burning hearth."

It was those childhood memories that he longed to capture when he opened
Etxebarri in Axpe (population 100) in 1990. In 2009, he received a
Michelin star.

In Etxebarri's kitchen, local encina (holm oak) is burned down to
blazing embers in wood-burning ovens and used for fueling the grills and
smoke-roasting. The restaurant goes through about four tons of wood each
month. Mr. Arguinzoniz winces at the notion of propane or charcoal. "The
only fuel worth cooking over is wood," he said.

When he opened his restaurant, Mr. Arguinzoniz wanted dishes more
ambitious than the chuletones -- rib steaks -- served at traditional
Basque grill parlors. For what he had in mind, though, the tools didn't
yet exist.

So the chef, a former paper mill manager, designed six sleek stainless
steel grills with geared cranks to raise and lower the grates to the
precise millimeter.

To grill angulas, Spain's prized baby eels, he cut the bottoms out of
frying pans and lined them with heat-resistant wire screening. To grill
mussels, he fitted a large pot with a sort of inverted funnel in the
bottom to catch the wood smoke.

To grill caviar, Mr. Arguinzoniz lined what looks like a metal steamer
with seaweed, placed the caviar on top, then positioned the device high
above apple-wood embers. "The gentle heat and wood smoke give caviar
flavor nuances you'd never dream of if you've experienced it only cold,"
he said.

Mr. Arguinzoniz prefers small fires to the Mephistophelian expanses of
embers favored by some cooks. For foods requiring the high heat of
direct grilling -- like supernaturally sweet hard-shell clams -- Mr.
Arguinzoniz doses each grill with precisely the number of embers he
wants. He restokes the fires for every dish.

Unlike Mr. De Clercq, he uses no rubs, spice pastes, marinades or
barbecue sauces. The only seasonings that could be seen in Mr.
Arguinzoniz's kitchen were fleur de sel and sea salt. For basting, he
spritzes the food on the grill with nothing more than olive or vegetable
oil from a spray bottle. Sauces are made on the spot from juices that
accumulate on the serving platter, emulsified with hot olive oil stirred
in with the bottom of a wire strainer. The result is understated but
intensely flavorful.

Thanks to some of his more offbeat creations (ember-grilled sea
cucumber, for example, grilled octopus so tiny they're handled with
tweezers or a soup made with grilled pea pods), Mr. Arguinzoniz has been
described as the Ferran Adrià of the grill. But he's a pure classicist
when it comes to flavor. "I don't like a lot of spices or condiments,"
he said. "My goal is to preserve and concentrate the flavor of each
food."

It's a sentiment that resonates with Mr. Bardet, the 35-year-old
executive chef at Le Louis XV.

"Despite our status as a Michelin three-star, our cuisine is very
traditional -- it's rustic, almost peasant," he said. "It connotes
summer, the outdoors, the pleasure of sharing with friends."

"Here at Alain Ducasse, we're all about flavor," Mr. Bardet continued.
"Grilling gives you a taste you simply can't get anywhere else."

In the Louis XV kitchen, the grilling is done on a pair of vintage
Labesse Giraudon Molteni grills installed more than a half-century ago.
For fuel, Mr. Bardet prefers natural lump charcoal made from beech.
"Wood heats unevenly, and it takes a long time to burn it down to
embers," he said. "With charcoal you get a good, even cooking surface
all at once."

So what's on the grill these days at Le Louis XV? "Right now we're
grilling wild salmon from the Adour, served with a sherry vinegar
reduction, and baby lamb from the Pyrenees marinated with summer savory
and espelette pepper," Mr. Bardet said. He also prizes the high, dry
heat of the grill for vegetables -- like radicchio, which the chef
seasons with olive paste and anchovies.

For Mr. Bardet, grilling represents the opposite of what's happening in
French cuisine today.

"With molecular cuisine and sous vide, everything is calibrated to the
nanosecond," he said. "What we love about grilling is that it's so
primitive, unpredictable, wild, even dangerous."

For Homaro Cantu, one of the most playful, forward-thinking chefs in the
United States, grilling is perfectly compatible with modernist cooking.

"You'll always find barbecue on my menu," said Mr. Cantu, 35, the chef
of the restaurants Moto and the recently opened iNG in Chicago.

Tucked away in iNG's basement kitchen, amid the essential oil extractor
and thermo scalable oven, is a custom-built, 12-gauge naval steel
wood-burning grill that would make any Texan feel right at home.

Recent offerings at iNG include popcorn puffed on a wood-burning grill
and seasoned with cider vinegar; grilled salmon served under a bell jar
filled with wood smoke; and tender, smoky baby back ribs skewered on
slender pipettes of a warm brothy essence of barbecue sauce. ("Take a
bite of meat, then squirt the sauce in your mouth," a waiter suggested.)

Mr. Cantu uses the smoker at Moto and the wood-burning grill at iNG in
very different ways from a typical grill master. "For starters, we don't
grill anything from start to finish." Instead, Mr. Cantu and crew might
use the hot grill to crisp the exterior of pan-fried quail or add a
layer of smoke flavor to a lamb T-bone.

For the "Japanese barbecue" at iNG, Thomas Bowman, 28, the executive
chef, braises monster beef short ribs, each weighing a pound, for 3 1/2
hours in a mixture of soy sauce, rice vinegar, brown sugar, garlic and
lemon grass. Just before being served, the ribs are grilled over blazing
cherry wood, imparting a crisp, charred crust and an inviting whiff of
wood smoke.

He and Mr. Cantu also burn wood for low-temperature smoking. "We'll cure
a pork belly with fish sauce, cane sugar, cilantro and other Vietnamese
seasonings," Mr. Cantu said. "Then we'll smoke it at 188 degrees for 12
hours. It comes out completely soft and without texture." (In iNG world,
this is a good thing, allowing the chef to impose the texture he desires
at the end.)

The most singular dish at iNG may well be an oxymoronic twist on what
most grill masters use as fuel: "edible charcoal."

"To make it, we whittle a spongy white bread into chunks shaped like
lump charcoal," Mr. Cantu explained. "We dye it with squid ink and
flavor it with Asian seasonings, then we pan-fry it crisp in vegetable
oil." Like all good charcoal, iNG's comes with a light dusting of white
ash -- achieved by plunging the black charcoal lumps in liquid nitrogen.

"A barbecue should be memorable," Mr. Cantu said. "Eating charcoal is an
experience you'll never forget."

Victor forwarded:

> As burgers and steaks are being flipped on backyard grills all across the
> United States this weekend, some of the world's top chefs are finding
> sophisticated new ways of handling this ancient, elemental cooking method.
> They are among a new generation of grill masters whose revolutionary
> techniques are redefining the very notion of grilling.

Very interesting! Thanks!

Bob

On Thu, 30 Jun 2011 22:44:28 -0700, "Bob Terwilliger"
> wrote:

> Victor forwarded:
>
> > As burgers and steaks are being flipped on backyard grills all across the
> > United States this weekend, some of the world's top chefs are finding
> > sophisticated new ways of handling this ancient, elemental cooking method.
> > They are among a new generation of grill masters whose revolutionary
> > techniques are redefining the very notion of grilling.
>
> Very interesting! Thanks!
>
Thanks for posting - but you forgot a link (this is NYT via Seattle):
<http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/mobile/?type=story&id=2015465516&>


--

Today's mighty oak is just yesterday's nut that held its ground.