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I love a good gadget—an oven that can self-adjust to bake better bread, a blender that cleans itself, a tricked out espresso maker that can foam milk while I’m in the other room wiping up whatever breakfast my children threw on the floor. And yet, the most fun I’ve had cooking in quite some time involved no buttons, no sensors, no electricity, no gas—heck, almost no ingredients, just a big pile of wood and a gaucho grill.
The grill I used was the Ñuke Delta, an Argentine-made monster (although, even at 265 pounds it is actually not the biggest grill the company makes). The Ñuke Delta is designed for the asado style of cooking, in which you use wood embers as a heat source. It’s different even than what you might do in some other open-fire settings, because the fire itself sits next to, rather than under, the cooking grate.
Here’s how it works: Pile your wood in the log holder (I used these boxes of split oak, but you may be able to find local wood deliveries or get larger quantities of wood through outfits like Cutting Edge Firewood) and use a fire starter to get a fire going. It will take about 60 minutes for embers to begin dropping onto the grill bed and closer to 90 to generate enough of them to cook with. As the embers fall, use a poker to sweep them across the bricks and under the grate. Continue feeding the fire by dropping more logs on top of the burning wood pile. Once you’ve built up enough heat in the grill bed, set the grate at the height you want it by using the lever on the side. Move it to the lowest level to get a beautiful sear on something like a thick pork chop, then crank it up higher to allow it to finish cooking over lower heat with the lid open or closed.
The Delta gaucho grill comes with some nice extras: a shovel and poker for manipulating the coals, a heavy griddle that fits right over the log holder, which is great for some additional grilling space and for cooking vegetables, and a warming drawer under the grill bed that can heat up any bread you might be having with dinner.
Now, if presiding over a fire for an hour and a half before you can begin to cook sounds like a long time to wait, it is. I happened to do it on a weekend when the heat index was 102°F, and I’ll tell you, cooking this way can feel like a real workout. But the very thing that made it taxing is also what made me feel connected to what I was doing.
It’s very easy to fall under the spell of “fast weeknight dinners,” “one-pot meals,” or whatever the “set it and forget it” appliance du jour happens to be. Those all have their place. This is not that. There is something both meditative and undeniably satisfying about caring for a fire for hours while you cook with it. It’s the same reason I (and many others, I’m sure) enjoy kneading bread by hand, or stacking my own layer cake, or folding and crimping dozens of dumplings. All these kinds of elbow-deep work are reminders that the process can make you as happy as the product.
One thought I had during my first sessions with the Delta was that, for all the blissed out escape I felt while in the zone over the fire, it might not be the most practical grill for a lot of people. It is expensive, and if the only way to use it requires giving over half a Saturday, that’s limiting. But after conversations with Ñuke and a little more testing myself, I found it pretty easy to lift the grate and build a charcoal fire right under it. The Delta is lined wall to wall with refractory bricks that help generate intense heat from the embers, but they’re also tough enough to stand up to a fire built directly on top of them. I had a fire ready in about the same amount of time it takes with any other charcoal grill. And those bricks help produce real standout grilling.
Like I said, I used barely any ingredients: I got some fresh cuts of pork and lamb and some well-made sausages from a local butcher, put some flaky salt on my chops and skewers, and let the fire do the rest.
The Delta is big, it’s heavy, it’s pricey—it’s not for the casual griller. But if you like working with fire or if you want to learn how, I’m not sure there’s any better way to give over half your Saturday than grilling on a Ñuke Delta.