Chimichurri dominicano

As tradition built it

Chimichurri dominicano (chimi)

Serves 6. About 50 minutes.

Ingredients

The sauce

• 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
• 120ml mayonnaise
• 60ml orange juice
• 120ml ketchup

The chimis

• 1 small onion, diced
• 1 cubanela pepper, diced
• 1 tsp garlic, minced
• ½ tsp dried oregano
• 900g minced beef
• 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
• 2 tsp salt
• 2 tbsp vegetable oil

To build

• 2 large tomatoes, in rounds
• 1 large onion, in rings
• 480ml cabbage, finely chopped
• 6 pan de agua rolls or burger buns

Method

1. Mix the Worcestershire sauce, mayonnaise, orange juice and ketchup, and keep it in the fridge.
2. Mix the onion, cubanela pepper, garlic and oregano into the beef with the Worcestershire sauce and salt. Divide it into 6 patties: long for pan de agua, round for buns.
3. Heat a plancha on high and oil it. Cook the patties about 4 minutes a side, turning them, until cooked through.
4. Oil the plancha again and warm the bread.
5. Add oil and heat the tomato and onion through without letting them go soft. Mix half the sauce into the cabbage.
6. Fill the bread with meat, onion, tomato and cabbage, with more sauce to taste, and serve at once.

Notes

Despite the name, this has nothing to do with Argentine chimichurri sauce. Dominican and English-language sources agree on the same origin story: in the 1970s an Argentine immigrant, named in one Dominican source as Juan Abrales, set up a Santo Domingo street cart selling choripán topped with genuine Argentine chimichurri sauce. Customers began asking for "a sandwich with chimichurri," the name stuck, and the food it named evolved into something with no remaining resemblance to the sauce it was named after.

Every street vendor keeps a personal recipe, so no two are ever quite the same, a genuine, working, unfixed street food rather than a dish with a single settled ratio to give. It is the Dominican Republic's late-night food, eaten after a night out.

The recipe is Clara González's, of Cocina Dominicana. Felipe Jiménez, for Olympus Digital, blends cilantro, soy and ají into the meat, uses a green tomato, butters the bread, and puts gherkins in the pink sauce. SuspiritosRD mixes the beef with longaniza and colours it with beet. None of the three cooks over charcoal.

What a modern chef changes

Hand-ground beef, quick-pickled crunch

Method

1. Grind the beef fresh and coarse in a dedicated grinder attachment rather than using pre-ground meat, then sear it hard and fast on the Big Green Egg's direct zone for real charcoal char, the one part of the dish's own name that is at least accidentally true to the technique.
2. Quick-pickle the green tomato and cabbage rather than using them raw, a fast vinegar treatment that echoes mangú's own pickled onion technique elsewhere in this chapter without importing anything foreign to the dish.
3. Dehydrate and grind a portion of sautéed onion into a fine, sweet dust worked into the mayonnaise, concentrating a flavour the traditional version only achieves by using a great deal of raw onion.