Cooking over fire doesn’t get more theatrical than this
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I’ve come to Somerset for a feast unlike any other. Tom Bray and his Galápagos-born wife, Ana Ortiz, are the founders of Fire Made (formerly known as Country Fire Kitchen), which creates South American-style fire cooking gear for chefs such as Marcus Wareing, Gordon Ramsay and Tomos Parry. They also run workshops and events, cook for private clients including David Beckham and Sam Taylor-Johnson, and know how to put on a show, even on the relatively modest rig – by their standards anyway – installed in their backyard.
How to describe this thing? A cross between an animal cage and a medieval torture device, their “Portico” grill is made out of metal rods, hanging chains, detachable grills and removable and retractable legs. It may be the most functional grill I’ve ever seen, with different sections to cook at varying levels of direct and indirect heat.
Today, it’s a haze of sizzling produce. A wedge of sirloin, flaked with salt, is hissing on a grill about half a foot above the flaming logs. Having been sufficiently smoked, it is about to be shifted to a higher rack to cook more slowly. The lamb rump beside it, however, is staying put, stained dark red from its Ecuadorian marinade of achiote paste with herbs, garlic and chilli. Next on the grill are lamb chops. Then ox-heart skewers (based on anticuchos, a Peruvian street food), which cook in a flash on a grid set on the embers. To finish, tomatoes and chillies cooked on hot coals, then smashed in a pestle and mortar to make aji (a chilli sauce).
Over lunch, which also includes potatoes with queso fresco sauce (made with a cow’s version of feta, blitzed with cream and parsley) and a lime-pickled radish, onion and tomato salad (a staple of barbecues in Ecuador), Bray and Ortiz debate the joys and travails of cooking together as husband and wife. Who is the better griller? They graciously nominate each other. Yet neither is beyond a little competitive nit-picking. “If I criticise him, he gets really angry,” says Ortiz. And vice versa. “We’ve learnt to coordinate,” Bray says. He supervises the bigger cuts, which take hours to cook. “I’m never happier than tending the fire with a beer,” he says. “I’m super-impatient,” counters Ortiz, who takes charge of smaller cuts, marinades and sauces. Though her favourite mode of fire cooking isn’t grilling at all; it’s making soups and stews such as fritada, an Ecuadorian braised-pork dish with garlic, spring onion and beer. “It’s the kind of food my grandad would make in big pots,” she recalls.
Ortiz grew up in Ecuador and her earliest memories of fire cooking revolve around her grandfather – Papi Polo – who used to rear pigs, sheep, chicken, turkeys and Andean guinea pigs. He would slaughter an animal on the farm and the family would cook a nose-to-tail meal over fire. He would make enough to feed the whole family: eight daughters, two sons and 20 grandchildren at a time.
Bray caught the fire-cooking bug from his in-laws. “I just loved the whole culture,” he says of the way Ortiz’s family would gather at weekends and work their way through buckets of meat, fish and vegetables. “I was instantly hooked on the social experience and relaxed atmosphere.”
The Fire Made business was an unexpected offshoot. Bray – then working for local government – commissioned a blacksmith to make an asado cross for his personal use. “A whole side of beef [cooked] on a cross is just the coolest thing,” he says. He posted pics on Twitter and was inundated by people asking where they could get one. He commissioned more to sell, had some grills made, and suddenly: “I had people turning up to my house to collect stuff,” he says. “I was like the Del Boy of South American barbecue equipment.”
In 2016, a showcase at London food festival, Meatopia, led to wider industry attention. Now the pair design and ship equipment to chefs around the world. “We’re increasingly seeing restaurants – from fine dining to street food – add elements of grilling or smoking to their menus,” says Bray.
The home market is also expanding. Fire Made’s consumer range now includes a smaller “Portico Home” grill, accessories such as chicken baskets and a flambadou (to heat and drip fat and butter), and a newly launched portable kit for cooking on the beach. Needless to say, the asado cross remains a big seller: “If you’re into meat and barbecues, there’s no greater spectacle,” says Bray. It’s the original dinner with a show. firemade.co.uk
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