Australian barbecues have nothing on this meat-crazed country

I once helped trick my old flatmate, Jason, into thinking Scottish people had never heard of barbecues.

Jason was from Queensland – at this point, he had never left Queensland. I had a Scottish friend staying with us, and he feigned ignorance when Jason told him we had a barbecue out the back. “A what?”

Stunned, Jason tried to explain the significance of the Aussie barbecue, flailing around for a way to capture its importance. “It’s like you’re born,” he said, incredulously, “and there’s barbecues.”

You’re born, and there’s barbecues. We Australians do love barbecues. We build social engagements around grilled meat. We structure celebrations around the humble hotplate.

And yet, we don’t like barbecues anywhere near as much as Argentinians do.

I’m in Buenos Aires, in the garden of a house in suburban Belgrano. Breathe deep and you can appreciate the classic scent of Buenos Aires on a Sunday afternoon: wood smoke and singed meat, an aroma that permeates every corner of the city.

The smoke here is coming from the parrilla in front of us, the wood-fired grill you will find out the back of almost every house, and quite often on top of apartment blocks, across Argentina.

You’re born, and there’s barbecues. That’s never truer than in Argentina, where the culture of the “asado” is so deeply ingrained, a family ritual played out across those backyards and rooftops every Sunday afternoon.

“We are obsessed with meat, we love it,” says Sophie Haley, today’s “asadora”, or grill chief, as she jabs a hunk of tenderloin to check its doneness. That’s no exaggeration either: Argentinians eat a colossal amount of beef, up there with the highest per capita consumption on the planet.

There is, however, more to the attraction of the asado than mere sustenance because asado might mean the huge platter of meats served over several hours, but it also means the social interaction, the ritual, the get-together that’s so vital to Argentinian culture.

And therein lies a problem you may have spotted: as a visitor to Argentina with no local friends or family, how do you get invited to an asado?

You can go to a parrilla, a typical grill restaurant, and eat the meat. But a real asado, a proper family get-together? No.

That is, until now. The asado I’m attending is put on by The Asado Experience, a relatively new business offering something no one else does: the chance for visitors to go to a normal Buenos Aires backyard and enjoy an asado.

You get the meat, but you also get the social interaction. And you get to understand just a little more about what it means to be Argentinian.

For instance, our asadora today is hardly typical. To begin with, she’s a she. (In fact, all the cooks at the Asado Experience are women.) And she’s 19.

Grill masters at Argentinian asados are generally the household patriarch, a man who takes his job very seriously, who will get up early on a Sunday morning and visit the butcher, tend to his parrilla and its fire in the middle of the day, prepare the many cuts of meat and vegetables and then progressively grill them with pride and skill (and a fair bit of salt) over the course of the afternoon.

Man’s work.

Sophie, however, puts the lie to that stereotype, wielding the tongs with expert ease, dishing up a feast today of matambrito – a distinctive, Argentinian cut of pork belly – sweetbreads, chorizo, blood sausage, tenderloin, not to mention onions and capsicums, all grilled “a punto”, to the point of perfection, tender, smokey and rich.

“Do you want to know some Argentinian gossip?”

I’m surrounded today by local Portenos, residents of Buenos Aires. No one else booked an Asado Experience today, so the company invited a group of locals to make sure I had a proper asado. And that, apparently, includes gossip. “Which Argentinian celebrities do you know?” they ask me.

“Um,” I respond through a mouthful of matambrito, “only football players and dead politicians.”

They laugh. “OK, you will just have to trust us that this is good gossip.”

And so we drink Malbec, we use cutlery that look like hunting knives, we chat, we laugh, we eat more meat, more vegetables, even more meat, as the evening progresses.

You’re born, and there’s barbecues. What a pleasure to live it.

The details

The Asado Experience is available every day for lunch or dinner, and costs $US200 (about $310) per person. See Australia-based South America Travel Centre for bookings, southamericatravelcentre.com.au

The writer travelled as a guest of the South America Travel Centre.

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