Asado a la Cruz: How to Cook Meat on an Iron Cross Beside the Fire

Heat travels sideways too

The cross is the most spectacular way to cook meat outdoors, and the slowest. It is also the one that teaches a lesson which changes how you use an ordinary barbecue (US: grill): heat does not only rise. It radiates.

The meat is fixed to an iron cross and the cross is planted in the ground, leaning towards a fire that burns next to it. The heat reaches the meat by radiation, soft and steady. No fat drips on the embers and nothing flares up. That is why a cut that would burn on a grill in twenty minutes can stand here for five hours and come off cooked from one side to the other.

What goes on the cross

Large pieces on the bone: a whole rack of beef ribs, half a lamb, half a kid goat, a suckling pig. Small cuts make no sense on a cross.

For a first attempt, choose the rack of beef ribs. It forgives far more than a lamb does, and it feeds eight to ten people.

Always start with the bone side facing the fire. The bones act as a shield and let the meat cook without being attacked. The turn comes only at the end, to brown the other face.

The fire, and the only control you have

Wood, burned to one side

Build a wood fire a little apart and keep shovelling embers from it towards the foot of the cross. Use hardwood, leña of holm oak (encina), oak (roble) or quebracho. No pine and no treated timber.

Distance is the thermostat

There are no knobs. If the meat is cooking too fast, move the cross away; if it is too slow, bring it closer. Start far off, at about 80 cm, and close in gradually over the hours.

Brine, not dry salt

On the cross you do not salt the meat dry. You brush it with brine, salmuera, every half hour:

• 1 litre of water
• 100 g of coarse salt (sal gruesa)
• Optional: a few cloves of garlic and a few sprigs of rosemary

The brine keeps the surface moist for hours and seasons the meat little by little. It is brine that goes on the brush, not chimichurri: the vinegar and garlic in the sauce would burn and turn bitter. The chimichurri waits on the table.

How to tell when it is done

Without a thermometer, read the bones. When the ribs come apart by themselves as you pull with your hand, and the meat has shrunk back to leave a couple of centimetres of bone showing, it is ready.

With a thermometer, look for 70–75 °C (158–167 °F) in the thickest part. This is not a pink-centre cook. The aim is melted collagen, and that takes temperature and hours. Compare a steak: a chuletón comes off at 52 °C (126 °F).

What the cross teaches you about your own barbecue

That indirect heat exists and is on your side. The gentle zone of a charcoal barbecue, the third of the grate with almost no coals under it, is a cross in miniature. It is where thick cuts are finished without burning. Once you have understood the cross, you have understood why your thick steaks used to char on the outside. Setting up those two zones is covered in how to light a charcoal barbecue.

The same meal without the ironwork

The cuts of an Argentinian asado also work on a normal grill with a two-zone fire. Tira de asado is short ribs cut across the bones in strips, which belong on the gentle side like any rib, and vacío is the grill name for flank steak. For the lamb joints we sell, see the lamb page.