The Mind of a Chef (2012) s03e03 Episode Script

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Fire is the most elemental part of a kitchen.
Yet in the post nouvelle cuisine age, food and fire have become distant from one another.
In this episode, chef Ed Lee travels to a remote island in Argentina to visit Francis Mallmann, the country's most esteemed chef and the godfather of open flame cooking.
How come the smoke doesn't bother you? I'm used to it.
I live in smoke.
Armed with just fire, smoke, meat and salt, Francis and Ed create a feast that reunites the simplest and arguably the best ingredients and cooking techniques.
Enter The Mind of a Chef.
All curious chefs are fascinated by their surroundings.
That is intense.
They don't teach you this in cooking school.
I'm always trying to figure out what else is out there, what's out of my comfort zone.
Concentric circles that I draw from myself keep getting bigger.
For me, smoke flavor is this incredible thing that I've been working with for the past ten years or so.
I discovered it and it kind of made me whole.
There's not too many cultures where that flavor is that important.
And then when I saw, oh, my God, apparently there's a whole country out there that does this and have been doing it for generations, but doing it in a way that's completely foreign to me, a totally different method.
I have to go there.
I have to see what they're doing and how that relates to what I'm doing.
We're going to go back to the roots and go back to prehistoric times and really live it.
Here we are in Lago la Plata, this beautiful pristine lake.
And you've got the Andes Mountains all around us.
You can feel this magnificence.
It's an incredibly humble feeling.
We're headed to La Isla, which is Francis's island.
We're going to get down to some rudimentary fire cooking, which is going to be great in the midst of all this stuff.
I can't wait.
Hola! Good morning! It's very beautiful.
I would like to spend the rest of my life here.
You have a nice trip? Unbelievable.
Francis Mallmann built a reputation for being a little bit outside the box and cooking this gorgeous food.
You know, very high end and luxurious, but also relating it back to this very rudimentary cooking process.
Ed, welcome to the island.
Thank you very much.
Very nice to have you here.
This is sort of a secret place in my dreams.
Wherever I am in the world, I'm always dreaming to be here.
In some sort of way, it was a place where I started developing all this fire.
There are seven different techniques of how to use fire to cook.
And I thought, "Wow, this is ridiculous.
" I decided to, you know, look into my steps into my childhood into the native history of Argentina, into the influence of all the immigrations.
The gaucho way of cooking; the cowboys.
And that's how all this started.
Anyway, so should we start? Yeah.
You see the possibilities of fire, the fragility.
It's not a rough thing, it's an extremely tender way of cooking.
First we have the grill, which is the barbecue.
We keep a mother fire on the side that provides coals to replenish the grill.
Then the chapa is cooking on a cast-iron grill.
We love that.
The wood oven.
The cauldron, which is cooking like a big stew in a big cast-iron pot.
And rescoldo, which is cooking in ashes, especially vegetables.
"Little hell," which is cooking in between two fires.
So you have heat from both sides.
And then the iron cross.
Cooking things standing, overlooking a fire.
Between all these techniques, we can cook almost anything.
I thought that we'd start chopping some very thin slices of wood.
Okay.
Tell me the names of these woods.
All this island has mainly lenga.
Is there an American equivalent to? I don't think so.
They're native from here.
And then we have some coihues, which is a perennial tree.
I gotcha.
That was it right there.
That's a nice chip.
When you set the fire, and you choose the logs you're going to use, you remember the moment when you cut each one of them.
In a way they're like children.
You see, I remember this gave me a lot of work, you know.
And then you burn it.
I will remember this guy.
There you go.
I love that.
You know, building a fire like this is like tending a new girlfriend.
Very slowly you make her happy.
You feel already the noise of the wood.
That's good.
This probably wasn't a very different a method than they did thousands of years ago.
Yeah, there's a beauty in fire language.
It's something that's inside of us long before we were born.
On our collective memory.
Even if you never saw fire in your life.
There's this thought that fire is a very manly thing.
But in fact, I feel that fire is very feminine.
Because to work with fire, it requires a lot of intuition, a lot of thought and a lot of tenderness.
And watching it and learning how it can change things as you cook.
Some olive oil.
That's important to know towards here.
So when we place the food, we decide where to put it.
And this is the part my mother hates, when I use her napkins.
She's ready.
Would you like to cut some very thin slices of this ham? This is a local ham.
It's not a very old one, but it's perfect for this.
Mmm it's nice.
Yeah, maybe slightly salty.
The tomatoes, I'm going to place them with nothing.
You're just going to let the natural sugar cook the? Yeah, I like the burnt side of it.
It's very important to respect the place where the food falls.
If you're constantly moving, you just destroy them.
Yeah, I agree.
To me, burnt flavor is everything.
It's a flavor, it's an ingredient, it's its own thing.
When you cook in a griddle like this, usually at the beginning things stick.
Once they start burning, they will leave the sticking.
They'll lift up, right.
When I see a burnt tomato, I get very excited.
Is this a typical breakfast in Argentina or is this a typical breakfast for you? This is a breakfast for me.
I love it in the early morning.
Especially I have big breakfast like this here.
Is that good or you need more ham? Let me see.
Yeah, that's wonderful, I love that.
Okay, so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to get my ham in the coffee.
Oh, so you're putting the ham in the coffee.
Yeah.
To me he's making eggs with, you know, red eye gravy.
This is not just regular coffee.
It's reduced, right? It's really reduced, yeah.
Very bitter.
It's really bitter.
And I have some fresh bread here.
These guys can go on this edge here.
This would be a bit less hot.
I'm going to get some butter on those toasts so they're really nasty and unhealthy.
Just put two little pieces on each.
This is little? Yeah.
I like the way you think.
Those tomatoes see how they're talking.
They're lifting.
I can see a little bit of black around the juices.
They're almost ready.
And I'm going to put the ham here.
That's insane.
You just pretty much just reduced the coffee to a paste.
Yeah, before it dries You see right now it's still slightly juicy.
I take it off.
That smells so good.
Okay, we're going to do the eggs now here in this corner.
Butter is one of the most delicious things ever, isn't it? I really like butter.
I wish I could have breakfast like this every day.
This is awesome.
We're going to turn these guys over here now so they get a bit of the coffee too.
So if you're doing this, you really don't need to drink coffee, huh? I'm always shocked at how you can go any place on this globe and again, I can't get any more remote than here and all of a sudden there's this dish that's really familiar to me.
That color is beautiful.
You want to put the eggs on top? Sure.
Great, and now the tomatoes.
We just flip them.
It's okay upside down.
Yeah, that's good, you see that's beautiful.
Yeah, really burnt.
When you see someone like Francis who has been cooking things for so long, you understand that certain things you just burn it, certain things you burn it for a little bit, certain things you burnt it a lot.
There's levels of burntness.
Everything has its place.
It's a beautiful thing to watch.
Just a little pepper.
And then I love to salt from a distance when I cook outside, you see.
Because I really like the way the salt falls.
Never seen anyone burn country ham and then deglaze it with coffee.
It's crazy.
I think it makes a good breakfast.
It's beautiful.
I think we all take fire for granted, that it's just there when we need it, and all of a sudden when you have to make your own fire to cook something, it really makes you stop and think this is something that people have been doing for centuries, millennia.
It really gives you a lump in your throat.
We're just a small piece of this huge, long puzzle that's been going on.
Being here I feel like I'm stepping back in time.
You got one already? Yeah.
Hey, darling.
Oh, the rain starts.
Very good for fishing, rain.
These we're going to eat the eggs.
Oh, you got one with eggs? Yeah, beautiful.
Oh, got one, got one.
Oh, I got a big one, I got a big one.
Good! Pick up the line.
Don't leave it loose.
Bring it back slowly.
Very nice.
It's a rainbow trout.
Very nice size.
It's a good one, huh? You got another one? Yeah.
I can see why women love you, Francis.
"Little hell" is what you call this? In Spanish, infiernillo.
Infiernillo.
You cook in the middle.
It's really, really hot, so it cooks very fast.
Do you think you can bring me some water from the lake? Yeah, sure, sure.
This is what you drink and cook with on the island? Yeah, it's very good water.
Snow water.
We're going to have this meeting of salt and water.
One of the things that attracts me about this cuisine is there's no sauces really.
There's no garnishes to hide behind.
Thank you.
It has to have a consistency of wet sand.
That's good, yeah.
I'm going to do sort of a thick bed because the fire will be stronger from the bottom.
And I want to protect them a bit.
We put one.
We'll do two brook trouts, two male.
Yours is a lady.
Of course it is.
Oh, she's a beauty.
She is.
Thank you very much.
The beauty of the salt crust is that the salt gets hard as a rock.
It doesn't let any of the humidity of the fish leave this case.
And because of that, the trout is sort of steamed.
If you grill it, it will lose water.
If you cook it in a pan, it will lose water.
But here, all the juices of the trout of the flesh stay in the trout.
And that's a beautiful part of it.
You do it very slowly so it doesn't collapse.
Perfect.
How long ago did this fire get started? An hour ago.
That's a lot of time and manpower and wood and energy being expended for a small amount of food.
Hard as a rock.
Oh, my God, it really is.
So fast.
It will be ready in ten minutes.
Heat goes up.
So the bottom fire cooks much faster than the top one.
I'll even throw some water on it so it really stops cooking.
So it goes on cooking on the top.
It's a bit more complicated than just turning down a stove, huh? Yeah.
It's completely cooled off down here.
A little glass of wine? Thank you.
Want to just take a little look at it.
It's ready.
Yeah? That smell is intoxicating.
It's so nice.
It is, no? The salt is really only a thin layer that's hard.
Everything else inside is still granular, but super, super hot.
And it's just all perfumed with the fish.
So we serve the three fillets.
It's perfectly cooked.
Yeah.
Timing is very important.
I don't really see it getting any fresher than pulling it out of the lake in the morning.
You know, you really appreciate and respect what earth gives you when you get to eat something that was alive just a few hours ago.
The one in the middle, the paler one is the rainbow trout, yes? Yeah.
The brook trout, slightly thicker flakes and much more orange color.
To have that trout and be so elegant gives you a new appreciation for what you can do in a very subtle, soft way with fire.
I love that.
That salt is the best thing almost.
I've never been anywhere this remote.
Just sit out here and look at the stars.
There are more stars than I've ever seen in my life.
After dark there's no noise.
You can't hear anything.
That silence is deafening.
And when you build a fire out here, you can hear every crackle, every fiber of wood being diminished into nothing and just going away.
Whatever it is that gets you out of the norm is good because it stirs things up inside you.
Going to make like an "A".
Like that? Yeah.
I want to start the fire with no paper.
Uh-oh, the poncho comes off.
Yeah, start exercising.
Start the fire, we're going to use very fragile ones.
You see these tiny ones are very important.
I've never put this much thought into building a fire.
Well, Napoleon said, "Dress me slowly.
I'm in a hurry.
" And I think it works too with a fire.
So let's see if we can achieve it with one match.
Now a bigger size.
Very slowly so it doesn't collapse.
It's really going now.
Now we go bigger.
This guy's excellent.
I will never forget how to make a fire now.
With no paper.
No paper.
Very medieval.
I love it, I love it.
So how old is this cooking method? I think it came from the Arab to Spain through the Moors, and from Spain to Argentina.
That's one theory that I quite like.
You pull that way.
All you're doing is releasing the rib bone from the spine.
Very taut.
It sort of opens up to receive all the heat.
Now we're going to wire it up.
You don't salt it before? No, I salt it when it's warm with what we call salmuera, a brine we make.
It's just hot water and coarse salt.
Then we're going to tighten up with a plier.
Almost making a tourniquet.
Yeah, that's what I'm doing.
Yeah, looks good.
All right.
Fire is happy.
Let's feel the heat a bit.
Just imagine you're the lamb here.
It's pretty hot.
Pretty hot.
You know, the wind is coming from the east so that's bad because it's too hot.
You get waves with the wind.
And I want a steady thing.
Fire is both an art form and a science.
Cooking is not about controlling every single piece of your environment, but actually working in conjunction with your environment.
Perfect.
It's instinctual.
You have nothing to rely on but your hands, your face, how hot your cheeks get.
You're warming up.
Yeah, so that's what the lamb wants.
If you don't have any wind and it cooks slowly like this, it's like in love, you know.
It's like you both give in to this beautiful caress.
But if you're cold and hot to cold, it doesn't work.
I'm learning lots from you.
The fascinating thing is that for Francis, fire is an ingredient.
Fire isn't something that just generates heat.
It's its own living, breathing thing.
So now we're going to tie the chickens.
Okay.
What I want to do is have enough twine around it so I can hang it in all these different places.
You can hang it from here.
And then you can hang it from here.
So you want an even distribution all around it.
Yeah.
I've never seen chicken cooked in this way.
Me neither.
See, I have a theory that I like as much skin exposed to the heat as possible.
I'm a skin man.
Going to try to pull this guy over here.
Come across here.
Pull this guy over here.
So hopefully, it will hang like this.
Almost like you were doing with the asador.
Yeah, like butterfly like that.
I'm going to just salt them now.
Let's hang the ladies.
Are they lady chickens? I have no idea.
This is beautiful.
I don't know if you've ever been to Chinatown.
Yeah, you see the ducks like this.
Yeah, I kind of want it to hang a little bit lower.
So we're going to get this fire going now a bit more.
Wait a bit and see what happens with the heat.
Yours looks very handsome, I think.
She's not discreet.
They don't teach you this in cooking school.
They don't, no.
We're going to start salting the lamb with this salmoira.
As the water and the salt dries up, it goes more into the meat because of the humidity and the vapor.
Francis is a beast.
He's kind of a contradiction, because he's very refined, he's got beautiful taste.
But he's this really instinctual animal.
Epa! I think I'm getting the color quite fast.
Ah, you're beautiful young ladies.
When it's really hot, I turn it and I do the crackling on this side so it's really crispy.
We're going to check it, maybe slightly move it to one side, to the other.
You got to really watch him.
You feel the energy that dances around him.
You have to almost be cooking right next to him to see how complex it really is.
I can't think of any better way to train yourself to get to the next level as a chef.
Until you sort of pass through this ritual of fire, literally.
There might not be much left for the guests.
I haven't felt this invigorated in years.
Because I was tested.
It's an incredible journey back to some kind of origin of what I do.
What I do and what I've always done is cook.
Look how lovely that is.
That's perfect.
I've created fires before plenty in my life.
But being able to do it next to Francis is a whole new experience.
Being here on this island is kind of like a dream.
And like most dreams, some of it makes sense, some of it doesn't.
Salud.
But at some point I'll wake up from this dream and then I have to see what will be left, what I'll remember.
For more information on The Mind of a Chef, go to pbs.
org/themindofachef.