WOOD, SMOKE AND FIRE ARE LIGHTING UP COMO MENUS, FROM THE MALDIVES TO BANGKOK. TRACES A NEW TREND BACK TO ITS ANCIENT ROOTS
BENJAMIN PARKER
Sheltering under the high thatched roof of the secluded COMO Beach Club on the Malacca Strait, hours slip past as easily at the droplets running down my glass of wine. Smoke flickers across the views of Phang Nga Bay, plumes puffing from a barbecue where a mild-mannered chef scruffs chicken on the grill. Minutes later the dish arrives, caramelised and spiced, the meat all but falling off the bone, coddled by the flames. COMO’s evolving gastronomy is having a love affair with the blaze – stripped back, fire-centric dining that uses the nuances of wood and flames to provide rich flavours. “Cooking with wood is an ancient method, and yet we’re still finding new ways to channel flames and stoke wood to suit our diverse palates,” says Daniel Moran, Group Executive Chef for COMO; “There’s something fundamentally attractive about using fire.”
A resurgence in wood-fired cooking has seen a billow of high-end restaurants open in gourmet hotspots: Kiln in London, Lupulo in New York City and Burnt Ends in Singapore. European barbecue is growing in stature too, thanks to trailblazer Victor Arguinzoniz who is Head Chef at Michelinstarred Asador Etxebarri in Spain's Basque region – where everything on the menu, even dessert, has been prepared on an open flame. But the pioneer of modern fire cooking is Francis Mallmann – ‘the Godfather of Fire’, Moran calls him. An Argentine chef and restaurateur, Mallmann turned his back on haute cuisine in the 1980s, choosing instead to pursue the traditional raw-flame-grilling style of the Patagonian gauchos.
This trend has also now entered the house. In the last five years the ‘Josper’ has topped the wish lists of cooks. This Spanish indoor charcoal barbecue, around since the 1970s, can reach temperatures of up to 500ºC, muscling out the science-fiction-esque kitchen equipment used to create the complex mousses and foams popularised by Heston Blumenthal. Home cooks are using smaller brick ovens to give their casseroles a deeper, earthier flavour, and to sear their sourdough crusts in a way that a conventional oven could never manage. Wood-fed smoking ovens are getting in on the action too. Primed for the Deep South’s ‘low and slow’ barbecue techniques, these ovens complement the relatively quick cooking time of the faithful Weber grill.
The trend’s meteoric rise comes as no surprise to Moran, who grew up on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. Food being cooked over flames, without ceremony or affectation, was imprinted on his childhood. “I saw it in Aussie culture. We would surf, be on the beach, cook in this most basic way.