“No hay pirata sin vicio,
ni tesoro sin desperdicio.

A mar revuelto,
ganancia de filibusteros.

Los piratas de ojo tapado,
dueños de las islas
y de los mares amos.”

(my translation, with no rhyming: There is no pirate without vice nor treasure without loss. A churning sea is the buccaneer’s profit. The pirates with covered eye are owners of the islands and lords of the seas.)

– from the Barbaroja brewery menu

Belén de Escobar – In a city nicknamed “the flower city”, I must admit I was hard-pressed to find any particularly interesting flower gardens. Yet, last Sunday, I headed to this small town to the northwest of Buenos Aires to checkout just exactly that. I have to get used to that on Sundays, things here are really closed up once you leave the capital – other than a few cafes near to the train station where I finally descended after nearly two hours of travel and two train lines – nothing was open. I’ll post a bit more about the various parks and monuments, since those are what I was able to see, in the next post, in the meantime, let’s jump to, more or less, the end of my wander, where, famished and thirsty… it was four in the afternoon and I’d had yet to eat or drink anything since my morning coffee… found me just outside of town trudging down Ruta 25 to number 2567 and the site of the BarbaRoja Brewery. I mean, as long as I was there, you know? I was just hoping that given their claim that it was a bit of a tourist attraction, and being across from the Temaiken Zoo (which I didn’t visit given the lateness in the day, opting to leave it for a day when Henry can join me – he loves zoos), it would be open. The brewery itself was not – closed up tighter than a crown cap – but, the restaurant, gift shop, and play area (several families taking advantage of a small basketball court, a soccer pitch, ping pong table and foosball table, all provided free to visitors), were in open for business.

If you go back a trio of years, I tasted through a half dozen of this brewery’s wares and liked several of them. In retrospect, I wish I’d had my notes with me, as I opted for a sampler tray – five of the beers were the same as what I’d sampled, and my notes pretty much stand on those. The sampler included the trigo, or wheat beer, a basic lager which I hadn’t tried and which was quite refreshing and good, the cloyingly sweet lemon beer, which I found borderline undrinkable this time, the negra, or black beer, still pretty overwhelmingly burnt tasting, the roja, which once again was my favorite, and the fruit beer, which, while it would work as I suggested with something spicy, peppery, I’m not so sure anymore – it seemed even sweeter this time than the lemon beer and didn’t work when paired up with the house pizza…

…which sounded far stranger than it turned out to be. Had I been thinking clearly, rather than being just ready to eat anything that wasn’t moving, I might have asked for the pizza “half and half” with one of the other choices – but as I’ve mentioned in the past – if someone is willing to put their name on an item as their signature dish – I’m generally up for giving it a shot – so the Pizza BarbaRoja it was. Sauerkraut and german sausage. Yeah, well, you hadn’t been out and about in the hot sun for close to five hours at that point, so you’ll just have to accept that it seemed like a good idea. And, it turned out to be pretty good. By no means the best pizza I’ve ever had, and unquestionably weird – but the crust was good, it was a white pizza, sans tomato sauce – just topped with a fairly good and not overly vinegary or sweet sauerkraut with bits of bacon in it, slices of german sausage, and a bit of mozzarella. I ate most of it and was happy. So there.

“…a man that can’t quickly throw together a meal is always going to be dependent on someone else to feed him, be that his wife, girlfriend, or McDonald’s. Dependency is not an admirable trait in a man. You don’t want to be the guy that has to turn to frozen pizzas just because your finer half decided to have Cosmos with the ladies.”

– Scott Kustes, guest blogger on The Art of Manliness

Buenos Aires – I know I don’t really have to convince anyone reading this blog that it’s worth learning how to cook something… well. Or maybe I do. I know I don’t need any convincing, and as long time readers know, I’m always up for learning and/or teaching something new.

The first session of class number three in our Color Palate of Italy program came off without a hitch – well, only one person showed up for the class, but hey, we had a good time! The class session was on pizza and related dishes – we made a grilled pizza topped with radiccheta and parmigiano, a traditional style Sicilian pizza with pecorino and anchovies, a rosemary and sea salt topped foccacia, and a piadina filled with sauteed vegetables drizzled with a tomato vinaigrette. More photos here.

Now, you know I’m not standing around doing nothing in between classes. I made arrangements with a local Brazilian chef to spend some time with him in his home kitchen, learning a few of the secrets of Brazilian cuisine. While I’m not going to reveal any of his recipes, as he plans to be offering public classes in the near future (more details when they’re available), I’m happy to share a few photos of what we made.

We started off with a couple of bean based dishes, beans being quite important in Brazilian cooking. First up, a feijoada, the national dish of Brazil. You might remember my first attempt at the dish – let’s just say that while I may have been in the ballpark, it’s likely I was in the back of the bleachers….

Henry and I had tried this dish at a Brazilian restaurant here that’s now closed, feijao de tropeira, sort of a bean and greens scramble, accompanied if you like by a fried banana. While I noted that I wasn’t wowed by the dish when we had it, I loved this one, and it’s oh, so simple… really.

On to other classes – I had a request for a “basics of local cooking” class – a one session look at empanadas, locro, and chimichurri – what could be better than all that? I’ve currently got one class scheduled with spaces available (as of posting this anyway), but am open to repeating it on another day and time.

“What the hell do you think Leona really puts in that pizza?”

– Lili Taylor as JoJo in Mystic Pizza

Buenos Aires – Those of you who’ve been reading awhile might remember the fiasco I considered the much lauded Guido’s Bar in Palermo. I know, I know, I hear regularly from people how amazing it is, how much food you get, how incredible the food, the atmosphere, the people. I don’t get it. From my perspective, anyone who likes a place like that probably loves hanging out in Little Italy in NYC, one of the biggest jokes on the “Italian” food eating public that’s ever been perpetrated. I have been back to Guido’s once more to see if it was simply an off-day – it wasn’t, the menu was virtually identical that we received, and without being asked for additional plates, we were cut off after simply receiving antipasti and a couple of mediocre pastas – asking for more didn’t elicit any scorn, and we received, once again, a small plate of meat to share, but for the price, we shouldn’t have had to ask, they should have been asking us. I standby my rip-off assessment.

Overall, recommended for a very nice evening!

 Chicago-Style Pizza. There’s a lot of disagreement about what this actually is. It’s thicker than New York pizza, that’s for sure, but after that all bets are pretty much off. Most folks will argue that Chicago Pizza’s claim to fame is simply a thick wheat crust. However to me Chicago’s great contribution to pizza crust is not merely thickness (for the bests crust are not all that thick) but corn meal and in many cases, potato starch. To me these will always be the defining characteristics of a true “Chicago” pizza. The sauce can either be on the top or the bottom.”

– Joe Pastry

Buenos Aires – Need one say anything more? It was worth the effort to make it…

 You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.”

– Yogi Berra, former Baseball Player and Manager

Buenos Aires – It’s been a pizza kind of week, and part of that, as always, is the search for better and better pizza in town. A couple that came to my attention recently both deserve plaudits for the quality of their offerings…

I was on a wander in Boedo the other day, and there are actually several pizzerias in the barrio that have been touted as being amongst the best in the city. It’s not a barrio I get to often, which is a shame, because it’s got some fascinating architecture, beautiful streets, and truthfully, I’ve always found myself having a decent meal wherever I’ve stopped in. There’s even a relatively new puertas cerradas that I have to check out one of these days. One of the pizza spots that consistently gets high marks is Gata 2000, Pichincha 810 – I take it the name refers to both a female cat (the corporation behind the restaurant is called cuatro patas, or “four legs”), and perhaps the year they opened?

The pizza is great. Really great actually, and certainly places it into one of my top ten in the city. The style is a la piedra, a thin, but not grilled pizza thin crust – very rich and yeasty tasting, like they really let the flavors develop – good pizza dough should sit for a minimum of 24 hours to allow the fermentation of the yeast and ripening of flavors. The tomato sauce, fresh and zesty. Plenty of quite good mozzarella cheese, and though I often like to either go with something very basic to see how they do, or with the “house special” – after all, if the place is willing to put their name on it… – but my eyes were interrupted by the vision of a pizza called the ¡Ay Caramba! – topped with hot pepper flakes, chorizo colorado (which is a chorizo sausage closer to the Spanish or Portuguese style – cured and firm), and roasted red peppers. How could I pass that up?

Gata 2000 also wins honors for what might just be the best fainá (the chickpea flatbread that here is often used as a top crust or side dish to pizza) I’ve ever had – smoky, well seasoned, and served piping hot from the oven. They also offer their pizzas in three sizes – large, small, and individual, the last of which really is a perfect size for one person.

Over in a more widely traveled section of town for visitors, and probably even for most expats, a friend of mine suggested we drop in on Io Te Amasso (as far as I know, “amasso” is not an actual Italian word, it should probably be ammasso, with two m’s, meaning something along the lines of piled up, or gathered together – then the name would mean something like “You and I meet up” in idiomatic expression) – the place has two branches, near to each other, we ate at the one at Malabia 1885, right on Plaza Armenia. [Both locations have closed.]

This place offers up wood-burning oven cracker thin pizzas – Napolitana style – not parrilla style. The crust, for this type of pizza, is one of the best I’ve had here – certainly beating out my previous favorite napolitana in the city, Bakano. The sauce is fresh but a little bland (salt is on the table, pepper in a shaker is delivered when asked for – they really ought to have pepper grinders), the cheese is great, the toppings plentiful – here we split a pizza into two (an option they only offer on the large pizza, not the medium, and there is no small or individual size) – one side with good, smoky bacon, the other side I went with the house special, named after the restaurant and then noted as chambota, which is a slow cooked mix of peppers, onions, and eggplant in olive oil. Great flavors, and plenty of each topping. Overall it could have used some more spice or zip to it, but it’s definitely a good pizza. Their fainá was just kind of average – good but nothing special, though at least served nice and hot. They’re a little pricey – this pizza was 35 pesos, but hey, it’s the middle of Palermo, so what can I expect?

“Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”

– Susan Ertz, Novelist

Finally, the pizza arrived – an individual sized pizza that really is individual sized, rather than feeling like I’m overdoing it – well, maybe without the empanada the pizza would have seemed a touch too small. The house classic, the pizza los inmortales is a gooey, delicious mix of plenty of herb covered mozzarella, crushed fresh tomatoes and garlic, roasted red pepper, anchovies, and whole olives (pitted again, yay!). Nothing wrong with that. It might even edge somewhere into the lower echelons of the top ten in town.