Barcelona BBQ Guest Chefs is an ongoing series of video blogs with interesting barbecue chefs and cultural personalities. If you are or know someone that has an unique recipe, barbecue, location or story, please contact us, we would love to share your story, and maybe make a video of your next barbecue.
Frank Plant talking barbecuing in Barcelona
(This is part one of a longer video to come)
I choose for my first guest barbecue chef, Mr. Frank Plant. Frank was one of the first people I met in Barcelona 12 years ago, and we met, ironically, at a barbecue of mutual Australian and Catalan friends. Frank and I have stayed close friends over the years and have spent many a barbecues together. Frank is known in his circle of friends for his Thanksgiving celebrations that include him smoking three turkeys for 50-60 people, affectionately called “Franksgiving”. It has been a Barcelona barbecue tradition for 17 years. It is quite a production and he has help, including his best friend Jan Van Ommen and many others.
Frank is a very personable character with impressive career in sculpture and, recently, jewelry design. Frank has successfully shown in galleries and art shows all over Europe and in the United States. Welded steel has always been the principal medium for Frank’s work, whether in his two dimensional pieces such as his fingerprints series or his earlier three dimensional kinetic metal sculptures, that incorporate found objects.
“My work is about physical and social observations. I think of things in terms of compositions whether that be an object, a line of text or a social situation. It’s important to me that the work be open and accessible.” – Frank Plant
ISSI – Little Heart Necklace by Frank Plant
His jewelry design company is called, ISSI. Which is a “small line preferring to stay with the iconography that (we) truly believe in. Simple and direct representations of the images that (we) feel unite us and help us create the community that we live in.”
Bulgogi Barbecue Marinade
Besides, Frank´s turkey smoking, his signature barbecue marinade is bulgogi, a traditional Korean barbecue recipe. For this particular barbecue in the video blog, we were celebrating Frank´s birthday and were expecting 50-60 people to attend, so Frank adjusted his recipe in our video to serve 5 kilos of meat, but you can find the recipe below for 3-4 person serving.
I also want to thank Barcelona band, The Gangsters of Love, for the music. Check out their many music projects and support local music. Thanks Danny and Marc.
Bon Profit!
- 1200 grams skirt steak Entraña in Spanish
- 8 tbsp soy sauce
- 4 tbsp sesame oil
- 2 tbsp brown sugar
- 2 tbsp honey
- 1 tbsp minced fresh ginger
- 1-2 units green onions
- 2 tbsp toasted sesame seeds
- 2 tbsp sherry
- dash fresh ground black pepper
- Chop garlic, ginger and onions into small pieces
- Mix all the ingredients into a mixing bowl and stir to dissolve everything into a thick liquid.
- Remove the membrane of the skirt steak, so it better absorbs the marinade. I cut the steak into portion sizes before the marinading. Lay out all the pieces into a dish and cover evenly with all the marinade. Leave this in the refrigerator for 24 hours before cooking.
- Barbecue the steak for 2-3 minutes on each side. With this marinade, it is best medium rare to rare.
Bon Profit
