- There's two kinds of moisture in wood,
one is that comes naturally from being green,
so when you cut a tree down there's tons of moisture in it.
And then you also have moisture
that comes in from rain and humidity.
Like today we have a little bit of a challenge.
It was a hurricane this week,
so all of our wood was wet,
it's like Jesus, there's nothing we can do
to keep the water out of the wood.
This is not your choice
so there's moisture obviously
from the rain and from humidity,
hear that?
(clanking)
It doesn't have that dead sound of like a baseball bat.
Whereas if you hit it with this,
that's a little more seasoned,
but like, you're looking for that dead sound.
(clanking)
That's when you know you've got better wood.
(upbeat music)
I can hear it hissing,
that's like the sound of a horror movie for us.
That means it's gonna be a hard day.
If you show right there,
you'll see the moisture boiling out of that wood.
That's our challenge.
The other big part of fire,
the other main component is oxygen.
And then once you get coals, you're home free.
Now it's really nice, it's ripping.
- So I'm Tom Ellis,
I'm the owner, operator of The Swell Party,
which is a catering and events company located
in the beautiful Hudson Valley.
Today we are at the Glen Falls House in Round Top, New York,
serving a fire-roasted dinner on Saturday nights
and doing a cookout on Sundays.
These pork shoulders we're going to use in the ssambap,
so we're gonna do a Dutch oven cook
on those for six hours in a braising liquid,
before we chuck them in there
we're gonna get a little sear on the outside.
We've got the plancha, right over the hot fire,
and we're letting that plancha get nice and hot,
so that when we get that first connection,
we're gonna get a lot of action right from the get-go.
(sizzling)
So we're just starting to get a crust on it,
because when you pull apart pork
and it's got those really brown bits
that come from that initial sear,
you get a bit of that crunch in there.
I like that in my pulled pork,
which is basically what this will be.
I do a little dance with them now
and try to get a little bit
of a sear on the sides as well.
So now we're gonna set them up in the Dutch ovens.
So before we got the fire moved in,
because then it's really hot,
he's gonna line it up so
that the legs will go on those bricks.
And this is straight up the American cowboy,
Dutch oven is a straight up American cowboy.
This would be like all the cattle train
what you would end up getting.
Cowboy cooking for the most part.
A lot of it is rooted in Argentinian traditions,
which is the gaucho, which is cowboy.
The idea that this stems from is guys on a cattle train,
so there was no kitchen, there was only fire.
So now here's the braising liquid.
So this is apple juice, orange juice,
chicken and beef stock,
and roast tomatillos and confit garlic.
This is where it starts,
this is step one is Dutch oven cooking.
Anybody can do this really.
And these Dutch ovens obviously
they really hold the heat really well,
and they distribute the heat really well.
As long as you get a nice distribution
of heat from the outside,
the heat is pretty much distributed through the metal.
Once the metal gets hot then it really starts to cook.
We're primarily using these fire ovens,
which are called infiernillos.
You can use them for a lot of different techniques,
as you can see it's built with components,
and they can be stacked in different ways,
and you can do top heat, bottom heat.
I've been working with these for like seven years,
and every season we come up
with a different thing you can do.
I love how it's got the outrigger,
so you can slide out and you can access the foods,
in every dish some component goes through the infiernillo.
- So this is a black sea bass
just like any other striped sea bass,
mild white flesh.
Right now I'm gonna take them out of the ice,
and just open their bellies up,
hit them with a little salt-and-pepper, sliced lemon,
and garlic scapes.
These are gonna get cooked in hay,
the hay is just like basically the moist cooking,
so it's not broiling,
we're doing more of a steam,
it's like a wet, moist heat.
The hay is moist and wet,
it's been soaking in water all day,
and that will keep it from catching fire and burning.
And is basically gonna
be our cooking vessel for the black sea bass.
So we want top heat and bottom heat,
steam it really good from the top and bottom.
- So you got the heat coming from both sides.
Percolating through the hay,
pulling the steam, the moisture,
at the end of the day the fish is steaming
from the moisture in the hay.
- So this is cheesecloth that's been soaked in wine,
so this is just one more flavor component
that we're gonna give to this fish.
- We really moved to this
because you can just look at the fish,
touch the fish, interact with it,
see how done,
and you get a lot of benefits,
you actually pull some notes,
you got some nice notes out of the hay,
you'll pull some sweet notes out of there,
flavor profile is enhanced by the hay.
I went to theater school and I was an actor,
there was always an appreciation for the theatrical
and for the experience of the guest.
What's great about the way we do this
is it's not theater for theater's sake,
sometimes it is,
but for the most part its form equals function.
- We started using a lot of hanging rigs,
and then we dropped down with wire or string
and you can roast from this fire,
so we get more use of the same fire.
Like we try to use the same fire
in a bunch of different ways,
because there's heat coming off in a bunch of directions.
We could slow roast them in a less visual way,
but again, this is part of the fun,
so we use the same fires,
try to use the same heat.
Roast them up, bring out their sugars
and then we're gonna break them down
into a pineapple chutney
that's gonna go on the ssambap.
And it's the components for that dish,
all they're going together,
the pork and pineapple are gonna be naturally paired up.
(upbeat music)
I was a caterer in New York for a long time,
and I was doing what people do in New York City,
which is hotbox catering.
At one point asked by a high-end wedding planner
to work with a company that was doing fire cooking,
and I was just blown away
by the idea of cooking fresh on site.
That was the real shock,
was like we're gonna bring the raw ingredients
and we're gonna cook this meal for 250 people banquet style
on site day of event.
I mean, that blew my mind, the notion of it.
I personally, I would never consider myself a chef,
I have a lot of respect for the word chef,
what that means in the world of food,
I'll leave that for Morimoto or Dan Barber.
I'm an events person,
and I understand events.
I understand food and beverage,
I've been in this business for 30 years,
I know I've done every job you can do,
and I tried to design and map a world of food
that people can execute.
- When people think of us,
a lot of times they do think about meat.
We actually enjoy the vegetables
as a more interesting part of it.
Mostly its beef, pork, chicken,
beef, pork, chicken.
Beef, pork, chicken.
But the palette of vegetables, it's infinite,
and it's seasonal, it changes through the year,
so it actually becomes
a more interesting thing to work with.
So we're gonna throw the rabe on,
and the rabe is gonna go in with the roasted onions,
and we're gonna top it with ricotta cheese
and make that cream up so
it's almost like a take on a creamed spinach.
And we've trimmed this down,
you take all the woody parts off of it,
because that ruins the dish
if you bite into a woody base of a broccoli rabe.
(upbeat music)
With the carrots we like to get them to get a char,
like actually to get black,
it gives them a really nice flavor.
Spread them out really good.
If they're not touching they're not gonna get color.
And you really don't want to steam them,
because then it's hard to get that char.
See now is where you start to multitask,
you've got two plancha's going,
you've got to remember those pineapples going.
You've got to remember those pork need fresh wood,
and you got to keep it all in your head.
We never stop moving,
it's a lot like sailing a big boat,
everybody's got a job and it's constantly changing,
and everybody's got to flow and move
within each other without causing problems,
and you're constantly working against the clock.
I'm gonna add the green beans to this,
this is a side for dinner,
this is the carrots with pulled beans.
- We're gonna build the apple dumplings right in here.
So apple dumplings, dropped dumplings, old school.
So apple dumplings was something my father,
was the only thing other than
the barbecue that my dad would do,
and it's just a poor person's desert.
It's definitely got an emotional punch.
Brown sugar, a lot of brown sugar.
A lot of cinnamon.
And then a little butter.
And we're gonna let that start to cook.
So this is a drop dumpling batter,
and it's kind of a gross dough.
It's like you almost feel like it's not gonna work,
every time you do it, it's like this is wrong,
this can't be how this works.
So I'm going for a touch here,
you know it when you feel it.
This is really getting into it, here.
And we're just going right in,
dropped dumplings are just like they sound,
they're meant for dropping in.
And you cover it, and it's gonna steam them up
and hopefully fluff them up.
Now you've got to put some coals on the top there.
That'll give you that top heat.
Okay, so it's been 5 1/2 hours,
so this guy should be ready.
I think anybody who does this,
barbecue or open fire cooking,
I think they'd tell you it's not easy, very challenging.
I'm 52,
and I feel every day if I have an 18 hour event day,
I'm banged up for four or five days afterwards.
It's fun, I like the challenge of keeping the fires going,
of making sure that the heat is where it needs to be.
Fire is primal and it's essential,
and it's truthful, it's what we had for thousands of years,
it's the history of man, it's cooking with wood.
It's in us, it's in our DNA,
it speaks to us in a very, very honest way.
And I've heard that the smell of fire,
because of our history with fire and cooking with fire,
that the smell of fire
actually starts the digestive process,
that it actually makes you begin to get ready to eat,
because you smell fire and you go oh, I'm gonna eat.
So there's an allure, it's a magical thing.