Chef an advocate of cooking with fire
By AC Shilton, Outdoor
Argentine celebrity chef Francis Mallmann can stand the heat—in fact, he loves it. But he wants to get the hell out of the kitchen. And he thinks you should, too.
“My least favorite place to cook is inside four walls,” he says. Next time you head out on a hike, Mallmann recommends taking along ingredients—a few eggs, a potato, an onion, a sprig of parsley, and some olive oil—for an impromptu, al fresco meal.”Go into the mountains and find a nice stream. Look for a stone with a wedged-out center. Place it over two flat stones and make a fire underneath it,” he says.
Once you’ve cooked in the woods (and no, coffee in a Jetboil doesn’t count), Mallmann swears you’ll never go back to those mush-in-a-pouch meals that many of us resort to in the backcountry.
Mallmann recently released “Mallmann on Fire”, a 100-recipe cookbook with the heft and richness of one of the seared sides of beef that made him famous in South America. The word cookbook feels somewhat inadequate to describe Mallmann on Fire. From the opening spread—a landscape portrait of Mallmann cooking fireside beneath the Andes — it’s clear the book is as much about travel, adventure, and a sense of place as it is about making food.