Brocheta de asado

The brocheta is the Río de la Plata parrilla's skewer course: beef, chorizo, chicken and vegetables threaded together and cooked over the same wood embers as the rest of the asado, seasoned with little more than coarse salt and served with chimichurri.

The French-derived name masks a format that Levantine immigrants — known in Argentina as turcos regardless of where they actually came from — reinforced across the country in the early twentieth century. Argentina has a large Syrian and Lebanese-descended population, and the skewer sits comfortably in a grilling culture that was already the most developed in the Americas.

The parrilla approach is the opposite of most kebab traditions: the fire is built to one side, embers are raked under the grill as needed, and everything cooks slowly at a distance. A brocheta on an asado is not seared — it takes twenty minutes or more at moderate heat, which is why the vegetables can share the skewer without burning.

Salt is the only seasoning applied before cooking, and it goes on as coarse sal parrillera. Chimichurri — parsley, garlic, oregano, vinegar, oil, chilli flake — is a table sauce in Argentina, applied after, and any asador will tell you that using it as a marinade is a foreign habit.

Beef — lomo, bife or a well-marbled cut — in generous cubes, with chorizo criollo cut into rounds, chicken thigh, red pepper and onion. Argentine chorizo is fresh rather than cured and needs cooking, which is one reason the skewer takes as long as it does.

Coarse salt. Chimichurri made an hour or more ahead so the flavours settle. Wood — quebracho if you can get it — rather than briquettes, since the slow ember fire is the whole method.

As one course of an asado, after the achuras (offal) and before or alongside the larger cuts, with chimichurri, bread, and a salad. Malbec. The asado is a long meal in a fixed order, and the brocheta has its place in that sequence rather than standing alone.