Every gaucho carried a gourd and a metal straw, and mate is still the most Argentine thing there is — passed around a circle, refilled from a thermos, drunk constantly and by everyone. It has never been treated as a cooking ingredient, which seemed like an oversight. Toasted, ground, and put next to black pepper, orange peel, and smoked salt, yerba turns into something genuinely new: grassy, bitter in the way good coffee is bitter, and an extraordinary crust on a steak. This is the only thing in the line that nobody else has on a shelf.
Press 1 tbsp onto a thick steak thirty minutes before it hits a very hot pan or grill — it forms a dark crust unlike anything else. Also salmon, pork chops, duck, roasted carrots and beets. Then the strange ones that work: vanilla ice cream, dark chocolate, the rim of an old fashioned.
Toasted yerba mate, smoked sea salt, cracked black pepper, orange peel, toasted coriander.
