Barrage of Beef, Argentine Style

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/08/dining/a-barrage-of-beef-argentine-style.html

Version 0 of 1.

Sometimes disappointments lead to happy accidents. By any measure, a long-anticipated fishing trip to the Iberá Marshes in Argentina was a bust. The week before we arrived in February, a biblical rainstorm inundated a half-million acres of wetlands, scattering the fish into deep cover. In such conditions you can tough it out (a resolutely macho course of action that rarely ends well), or you can bow to fate and head to Buenos Aires for a few days.

We chose Plan B, which is how we ended up dining at Tarquino, in the Hotel Hub Porteño. The chef, Dante Liporace, who had worked with Ferran Adrià at El Bulli, is one of the new generation of Argentine chefs influenced by Spain and its vanguard cuisine.

At first glance, Mr. Adrià’s brand of modernist cuisine would seem ill-suited to Argentina, which is a meat-and-potatoes country more concerned with fresh ingredients, simply prepared, than with the latest fancy food trend. At Tarquino, Mr. Liporace’s goal has been to combine modernist methods with brawny Argentine tastes. The meal he served us had its share of foams, spheres and artsy plating but, at heart, it was bold and gutsy. He hit the nail on the head with a dish of langoustines, tripe and sweetbreads, a ménage that sounded weird, but offered a sublimely smooth texture and savory unctuousness.

When Mr. Liporace worked at El Bulli, Mr. Adrià was serving a head-to-toe rabbit menu called “Sequence of Hare.” One day, Mr. Adrià suggested to Mr. Liporace that, as an Argentine, he should do a “Sequence of Cow.”

“This was four years ago,” Mr. Liporace said. “The idea stayed with me.” He is finally planning to do it in the coming months. In April, when Mr. Liporace visited New York, I asked for a dry run of his “Secuencia de la Vaca,” or as I think of it, “A Conjugation of Cow.”

The International Culinary Center in Lower Manhattan offered us a kitchen and sous-vide equipment for the meal, attended by chefs and faculty of the school. George Faison, an owner of DeBragga meats, rustled up the less run-of-the-mill cuts of cow, and the chef Ignacio Mattos, late of Il Buco and Isa, pitched in with a day of prep work. The resulting meal was a barrage of beef with powerfully concentrated flavors: five savory courses of tongue, sweetbreads, cheeks, bife de chorizo (sirloin) and a “coxtail” (a reduction of the braising liquids of oxtail, fortified with malbec and served in a shot glass).

Next year, a “Litany of Lamb”?