Half a million years ago, the world witnessed a revolution. An ape-like creature destined to become man became the first animal to cook its dinner. The mastery of fire by Homo erectus around 500,000 B.C. resulted in nothing less than the rise of civilization. Anthropologists have argued that the primitive act of roasting meat over fire ultimately led to language, art, religion, and complex social organization. In other words, you could say that grilling begat civilization.
How our forebears learned to grill remains a matter of speculation. Perhaps the first barbecue was the result of a forest fire, which roasted venison, bison, and other game on the hoof in a natural conflagration. Perhaps a haunch of meat fell into a campfire. Perhaps lightning struck a tree and transformed it into charcoal. In any case, archeological evidence suggests that by 125,000 B.C. man was using live fire to cook his meat and to help him extract from the bones a morsel particularly prized in prehistoric times: marrow.
The following millennia brought countless refinements to the art of cooking, from the invention of pottery and pots and pans to the bread machine and microwave oven. But when it comes to bringing out the primal flavor of food, nothing can rival grilling over a live fire.
This truth has not been lost to cultures as diverse as the Greek, Japanese, Australian, South African, and Argentinian. Grilling remains our most universal and universally beloved method of cooking. And in the past ten years, our own country has experienced a veritable grill mania.
It is this shared experience—and a desire to learn more about the cultures that produced its infinite regional variations—that led me to write this book.
The idea for the book came to me shortly after moving from Boston to Miami. South Florida is enough to sharpen anyone’s appetite for grilling. First, there’s the climate, which makes year-round grilling not only a possibility but almost a duty. (How different Miami is from Boston, where grilling in the winter requires donning arctic apparel!)
Then there’s Miami’s dizzying cultural diversity. Dade County, which includes Miami, is 50 percent Hispanic, and Miami itself is home to the nation’s largest Cuban, Nicaraguan, Colombian, and Haitian communities. But “Hispanic” only begins to describe what’s going on in Miami’s markets and restaurants: Not only are the countries of the Caribbean and South America represented, but virtually every country in Europe, Africa, and Asia as well. Global cuisine isn’t simply a curiosity or luxury here in South Florida. It’s a way of life.
So an idea began to take hold of my imagination: to explore how the world’s oldest and most universal cooking method varies from country to country, region to region, and culture to culture. To travel the world’s barbecue trail—if such a trail existed—and learn how pit masters and grill jockeys solve that age-old problem: how to cook food over live fire without burning it.
I resolved to explore the asados of Argentina and the churrascos of Brazil; to taste Jamaica’s jerk and Mexico’s barbacoa. I’d visit Greece to discover the secret of souvlaki and Italy to learn how to make an authentic bistecca alla fiorentina. My research introduced me to eat mechoui in Morocco and koftas in the Middle East, donner kebab in Turkey, and tandoori in India. I would visit the birthplace of Japanese yakitori, Indonesian saté, and Korean kui and bool kogi.
Of course, there’d be lots of live-fire cooking to investigate in my own country: from the ribs of Kansas City and Memphis to the pulled pork of the Carolinas and the slow-smoked briskets of Texas. I’d check out the wood-burning grills of California and the hearthside cookery of New England. The more I delved into the world of barbecuing and grilling, the more I became convinced that it is more than just another technique in a cook’s repertoire. It’s even more than a cultural phenomenon. The world over, it’s a way of life.
It wouldn’t hurt, I reasoned, that grilling and barbecuing fit so nicely into the contemporary North American lifestyle. These ancient methods support the four dominant trends in modern American cooking: our passion for explosive flavors; our fast-paced lifestyle, with its need for quick, easy cooking methods; our mushrooming health consciousness and desire to eat foods that are low in fat but high in flavor; our desire to turn our homes into our entertainment centers, to transform the daily necessity of food preparation into recreation—even fun.
If ever there was a cooking method to take us into the next millennium, it is grilling. We see its growing popularity in the skyrocketing sales of barbecue grills (currently, more than 70 percent of Americans own grills). We see it in the proliferation of barbecue festivals and restaurants with wood-burning grills.
The truth is that—in terms of ease, speed, and intensity of flavor—nothing can rival grilling. And as more Americans travel the barbecue trail and discover the regional subtleties of grilling, the movement will only grow.
I shared my idea with Peter Workman and Suzanne Rafer of Workman Publishing, who responded with an enthusiasm that matched my own. In fact, they encouraged me to broaden the scope of the original book from the twelve countries on which I had initially planned to focus to the entire world of grilling. (Easy for them to do! They wouldn’t have to worry about jet lag, visas, complex travel arrangements, vaccinations that turned my arms into pincushions, and gastrointestinal perils that would challenge the limits of my culinary curiosity.)
A proposal was written. A contract was executed.
And only then did I panic.
How would I visit more than twenty-five countries in the space of three years? How would I overcome local language barriers and sometimes less than favorable attitudes to American journalists? And even if I could communicate with street cooks and chefs, how would I persuade them to share their grilling secrets? How would I ferret out the best barbecue in countries I knew only from guidebooks?
I realized I had taken on the biggest challenge of my life.
I began, as any journalist does, with research. I read exhaustively both cookbooks and travel books. I queried colleagues with expertise in the various countries I planned to visit. I consulted with tourism bureaus and cultural attachés. I spoke with food and cookware importers, travel agents, anthropologists, foreigners I met here and abroad—anyone who could shed insight into the grilling of a particular country.
My informants included fellow journalists, university professors, business travelers, diplomats, and flight attendants. Some of my best information came from taxi drivers. (Of all professions, cabbies seem to possess the most unerring knowledge of who serves the best barbecue.) I planned as much as I could, then I made sure I was in the right place to capitalize on chance.
I speak French and Spanish and a smattering of Italian, Portuguese, and German (the latter is useful in Turkey), so in countries where these languages are spoken, I was able to work on my own. In countries where I didn’t speak the language, I found guides or interpreters. And of course I developed my own sign language:
“I” (point to me)
“write” (move my fingers to mime writing)
“about food” (raise an imaginary fork or chopsticks to my lips or rub my belly)
“I would like to” (again point to me)
“watch” (point to my eye)
“you cook.” (mime the act of grilling, mixing, chopping, or stir-frying)
I took with me one of my previous cookbooks. I would show the recipes and point to the photograph of me on the back cover.
I feared my efforts would be met with suspicion, secrecy, and rejection, but almost everywhere I went I encountered openness, warmth, and welcome. Virtually all of the grill jockeys I interviewed were not only willing but happy to share their knowledge. On many occasions, I was invited into the kitchen. I tried my hand at molding kofta meat onto skewers, fanning the coals, or slapping naan on the inside walls of a blazing tandoor. My efforts generally evoked peals of good-natured laughter.
I found myself in many places not frequented by most travelers, having experiences that ranged from fascinating to hair-raising. In Mexico I nibbled cactus worms and crickets as a prelude to barbecue. (The latter tasted like potato chips with legs.) In Uruguay I sampled testicles, tripe, intestines, kidneys, and blood sausage. In Bali I paid a 6 A.M. visit to the local babi guli (roast pork) man, who rewarded my punctuality by letting me help him slaughter a suckling pig. In Bangkok I was the guest of honor at an Isarn (northeastern Thai) restaurant whose fly-filled kitchen overlooked a stagnant canal. (I forced myself to eat with the enthusiasm appropriate to a guest of honor, and no one was more surprised than I when I didn’t get sick.
Some of the world’s best barbecue was off limits because of political turmoil. I would have liked to have visited Afganistan, Iraq, Iran, and some of the more turbulent former Soviet republics. Instead, I found experts and restaurants specializing in those cuisines in this country.
Barbecue buffs have a reputation for being a secretive bunch (at least in the United States), but virtually everywhere I traveled on the barbecue trail, cooks were happy to share their recipes and expertise. Some scrawled recipes for me, to be translated back at my hotel. Others drew pictures in my notebook to explain where a particular piece of meat came from or how to execute a particular cut. When possible, I credit the extraordinary grill hockeys I met by name (or at least by the name of their establishment).
Recipes are the heart of any cookbook, of course. In this one you’ll find more than five hundred, covering everything from Brazilian churrasco to Balinese shrimp satés to Memphis-style ribs. The essays describing some of my experiences are intended for the traveler (both active and armchair), as well as the cook.
My three years on the barbecue trail passed in what seems like the blink of any eye.
As I sit here writing these words, I picture all the remarkable places I’ve been, the kind, generous people I’ve met, and the extraordinary food I’ve been lucky enough to sample. And yet I can’t help but feel there’s so much more I would have liked to have accomplished. The world of barbecue is so vast and complex, any survey is bound to have blind spots. I honestly believe I could spend the rest of my life writing about barbecuing and grilling and still find new things to discover.
When writing the recipes, I’ve tried to be as authentic as possible. But I’ve also taken into account the fact that certain foods, seasonings, and cooking equipment simply aren’t available in the United States (not to mention the fact that our tastes and aesthetics are different). Whenever I depart from a traditional recipe, I’ve tried to suggest the way it would be made in its country of origin.
In my three years on the barbecue trail, I sampled many dishes I know most Americans would never dream of preparing at home. (A couple that come to mind are Uruguay’s choto (grilled coiled lamb’s intestines) and Indonesia’s saté padang (kebabs of beef entrails served in a fiery gravy). I’ve tried to describe these dishes in the essays and boxes in this book. I hope you’ll give them a try when you travel.
As I quickly discovered on the barbecue trail, grilling is an art, not a science. Many cooks work in unbelievably primitive conditions. Indeed, one of the reasons I’m drawn to grilling is that it’s so forgiving in terms of measurements and proportions. I hope you’ll use the recipes in this book as I do, that is, as a broad guideline. If you don’t feel like eating beef, make the recipe with chicken or seafood. Most of the marinades and rubs in this book—listed either as freestanding recipes or subrecipes in more elaborate preparations—can be used with any type of grilled fare. You’ll also notice that there is often more than one way to cook a particular dish. As I always say in my cooking classes: There’s no such thing as a mistake in the kitchen, just a new recipe waiting to be discovered.
Seasoning, marinating, and grilling are the cornerstones of live-fire cooking, which brings me to what I call the Barbecue Bible Method, and as you will see, it’s very simple. First marinate the meat, or rub it with spices. Then let the meat absorb the seasonings for as long as recommended or as long as you have time for. Finally, grill it over whatever sort of fuel on whatever sort of equipment you feel most comfortable using. That’s it.
Of course, I hope to expand your horizons—to inspire you to try new techniques and new flavors. But the bottom line is that I want you to make these recipes. Remember, cooking isn’t brain surgery. This is especially true for what is surely the world’s easiest cooking method, grilling.
Grilling is done, in some form or other, in virtually every country in the world. In some regions, it’s a marginal technique—something you do outdoors, for example, when you lack access to a proper kitchen. Or something a street vendor does.
In other countries, grilling lies at the core of the culture’s culinary identity. The grills may range from the shoebox–size braziers used in Southeast Asia to the behemoth fire pits found in South America and the American South. The preparations may be as simple as Argentina’s bife de lomo (grilled tenderloin seasoned only with salt) or as complex as Vietnam’s bo bun (thinly sliced, lemongrass-marinated beef eaten with noodles, chiles, crisp vegetables, aromatic herbs, and rice paper).
In researching my world tour of grilling and barbecue, I discovered that there is a barbecue belt that encircles the globe. Or more specifically, that there are six great barbecue zones. The United States and Mexico and the Caribbean comprise the first. Standing alone as the second is South America. On the other side of the Atlantic, the barbecue zone stretches from the Mediterranean Basin to the Middle East (number three) and from Arab North Africa to South Africa via the continent’s western coast (number four).
The largest contiguous barbecue zone starts in Turkey and runs east through the Caucasus Mountains, Central Asia, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India (number five). In the thirteenth century, the Mongols, led by Genghis Khan, spread their love of grilled meats as far west as Turkey. The Arab world refined the idea, then shipped it back via the Mogul rulers to the Indian subcontinent and possibly beyond to Indonesia.
The last great barbecue zone (number six) follows the eastern rim of the Pacific, stretching from Australia and Indonesia to Korea. Along the way, some of the world’s most interesting grilling can be found in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Macao, and Japan.
Thus, most of the world’s grilling takes place in the tropics, which you’d expect, given the proclivity of most humans in hot climates to cook outdoors. (Furthermore, most of the world’s spices grow in the tropics, which adds interest to the marinades and condiments traditionally associated with grilling.) But a great deal of remarkable live-fire cooking lies squarely outside the tropics: Consider Japan, Argentina, and our own United States.
What’s almost as interesting as where people do live-fire cooking is where they don’t. Grilling has never played much of a role in two of the world’s gastronomic superpowers: northern Europe and China. And although grilling is found in Central Africa, more often than not charcoal fires are used to heat stew pots and frying pans, not to cook the meats directly.
My first year on the barbecue trail, I focused my efforts in my own hemisphere. My first stop was the Jamaican town Boston Beach, birthplace of jerk. I island hopped my way across the Caribbean, stopping for French West Indian boucanée (chicken smoked over sugarcane), Trinidadian choka (spiced, grilled vegetables), lechon asado (Hispanic roast pig). The North American concept of barbecue (the intense spicing and slow smoky grilling) originated in the Caribbean, and the tradition remains alive and flourishing.
Next I headed for South America, home to some of the world’s most heroic grilling. I dined in stylish churrascarias in Rio de Janeiro, at the homey grill stalls of Montevideo’s Mercado del Puerto, and at landmark steak houses in Buenos Aires. I watched whole sides of beef being roasted in front of a campfire on an estancia (ranch) in the Pampas. South American grilling, I learned, represents one end of the barbecue spectrum, emphasizing simplicity and directness of flavor. Argentinians don’t even bother with marinades for most meats: the seasonings are limited to sea salt and the perfume of wood smoke.
The second year, I turned my attention to Asia. I visited Indonesia, birthplace of the saté and home to what is probably the world’s single largest repertoire of grilled dishes. I sampled dozens of different types of satés—a small fraction of what’s actually eaten in Indonesia. I learned that small is beautiful: Indonesian satés are cooked on grills the size of a shoebox and served on skewers as slender as broom straws.
Indonesia and my next destinations, Singapore and Malaysia, possess some of the world’s most complex marinades and spice mixtures. On the island of Penang in northern Malaysia, I watched grill jockeys pound ginger, chiles, galangal, lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, shrimp paste, and coconut milk into fragrant pastes for seasoning grilled meats and seafood. I scorched my tongue on the fiery achars (pickles) and sambals (relishes) that accompany grilled fare in Southeast Asia. This complex seasoning of grilled meats stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from the simple grilled meats of South America.
One common complaint about barbecue in the West is that it’s so, well, relentlessly carnivorous. In Thailand and Vietnam I found the perfect model for healthy barbecue: the pairing of small portions of grilled meats with large amounts of vegetables, rice, and noodles. The Thai often eat barbecued food wrapped in lettuce leaves (a practice echoed by Koreans), while in Vietnam the wrapping is done in crêpe-like sheets of rice paper. Fish sauce–based dipping sauces, toasted peanuts, sliced chiles, and fragrant basil and mint sprigs are often combined with grilled meats in a single, explosively flavorful bite.
As I moved north, the fish sauce and coconut milk marinades gave way to soy sauce and five-spice powder mixtures in Hong Kong and Macao and to sweet sesame marinades in Korea. In Japan (land of my birth, by the way), I sat elbow to elbow with Japanese businessmen in crowded Tokyo yakitori parlors, enjoying sweet-salty teriyaki and pungent barbecue sauces made from miso (cultured soybean paste) and umeboshi (pickled plums). I feasted on fabled Kobe beef and on ingredients I never knew you could grill, like okra and ginkgo nuts. Here, too, I learned that small is beautiful and that barbecue could be as subtle as haiku.
The third year, I focused my research on the Near East and the Mediterranean Basin. Turkish cooks introduced me to an astonishing array of kebabs and grilled vegetables. In Morocco I discovered mechouie (pit-roasted lamb), not to mention French-style brochettes flavored with pungent North African spices. In France I experienced the heady pleasures of grilling over grapevines. (One night, I drove four hundred miles to taste grilled escargots in a tiny village near Perpignon.) Italy, Spain, and Portugal impressed me with their wealth of simply grilled seafoods and vegetables.
Along the way, I filled in my travels: Mexico for its barbacoas and carne asado; India for its extraordinary tandoori and grilled breads; Israel for its shwarma, kofta, and grilled foie gras. I crisscrossed the United Stated, savoring pulled pork in the Carolinas, brisket in Texas, and ribs in Kansas City and Memphis.
All told, I traveled more than 150,000 miles to twenty-five countries on five continents.
Don’t ask me what my favorite barbecue is. It would be a little like asking the parents of a large family to name their favorite child.
I loved the plate-burying abundance of an Argentinian steak as much as the delicacy of Japanese yakitori. I loved the straightforwardness of Italian bistecca alla fiorentina as much as the complex layering of flavor characteristic of Indian tandoori. I loved the eat-with-your-fingers informality of North American barbecue and the chic of a Brazilian churrascaria. I loved the Asian-style grilling, with its modest portions of grilled meats in relation to the generous serving of starches and vegetables. But I wouldn’t snub my nose at a thick, juicy hamburger made from freshly ground sirloin charred over blazing hickory or mesquite.
Come to think of it, during three long years on the barbecue trail, there wasn’t a single meal I didn’t enjoy. So, as they say in Spanish, buen provecho; in Vietnamese, chuc qui ban an ngon; in Hindi, aap kha lijiya; in Japanese, itadakimasu; in Arabic, bessahaa; in Hebrew, b’teavon; in Korean, jharr chop su se yo; in French, bon appétit; in Chinese, man man chi. In other words, dig in!
—Steven Raichlen