Three days of cooking over live fire and I'm rethinking every protein technique I learned in fine dining. The grill doesn't lie. There's no convection fan to save you.
At The French Laundry, we had immersion circulators set to 0.1°C precision. Here, the only temperature control is distance from the coals and how hard the wind is blowing. It should feel primitive. Instead, it feels like the most honest cooking I've ever done.
The fish arrives whole, still stiff. We scale it, gut it, butterfly it. Coconut husk charcoal — not briquettes, not even lump hardwood. The coals from coconut husks burn cooler and sweeter than anything I've worked with. The smoke is gentle, almost floral.
The first night I overcooked everything. Years of precision training and a wood fire humbled me in twenty minutes. By night three, I'm reading the coals like a language. The orange ones sear. The white ones roast. The dark ones rest.
I'm filming everything for this week's recipe. But honestly — I don't think a recipe captures it. This is about feel. About standing next to a fire and paying attention. That's what I want to teach.