Ask any Argentinian what they put on their meat and the answer will always be the same: salt. To be perfectly honest I’m not even sure there’s a word for marinating in Spanish (ok, obviously that’s not true but you get my drift). Any authentic asador is always consistent in this fact. Here in Argentina there are three different types of refined salt. Just as a quick aside, refined salt is salt that is mechanically harvested and treated in order to take out the “impurities”. I’m not sure you can consider the natural minerals found in salt as “impurities” but that’s neither here nor there for this topic of discussion. Anyways, as I was saying, there are three different sizes in salt used here. The first is fine salt known in Spanish as sal fina. The next is semi-fine salt or sal entrefina and finally we have sal gruesa or coarse salt. Products such as sea salt, pink Himalayan crystal salt and plan old kosher salt have yet to really take off down here as of right now.
Sal entrefina or semi-fine salt is typically used to sprinkle on meats in order to help them marinate in their own juices. This is obviously advertised from the fact that on the box most times it will say sal parillera or para la parrilla which directly translates to salt for the grill or grilling salt. Besides this it is quite common to find this salt sold in extremely large heavy-duty plastic resealable containers. To get an idea of how massive these salt shakers are see picture above. If you’re familiar with ‘tall boy’ beer cans, it’s about that size but slightly larger. As I said, people in Argentina are serious about their salt.
Although sal entrefina is commonly used on the grill that’s not to say that all asadors have the same style. Some will choose one of the other two salts because of it’s crystal sizes. There’s certainly no science to this method besides recognizing what makes certain meats saltier than others. Meats that are fattier and larger in size (larger in size referring to how much meat you’re cooking because it is typical in Argentina to cook steaks in large chunks of beef and then slice them into single servings at a later point) can better stand up to the big crystals from sal grueso a.k.a. Course salt. If you’re cooking the meat as a whole slab the salt acts as a sort of slow release from rendering fat, keeping the meat nice, tender and juicy.
Steak Buenos Aires 