Alejandro Gutierrez, Mexico
FIRE IS LIFE
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©BIG GREEN EGG
According to Alejandro Gutierrez, fire is life. “Being Fire as a source of around a fire with those you heat and light, and love – sharing, cooking and as a literal spark laughing – for me that’s the meaning of life. It makes me for transportation happy, and happy people and the Industrial make for a better world.” Revolution. Fire on Alejandro grew up in the Mexican city of Monterrey, hillside temples in Nuevo León, around a ancient Greece as a fire. He says he distinctly beacon to ships at remembers when he fell in love with cooking over fire: sea. Fire as a basic “I was seven years old, at cooking technique. my uncle’s house, and was Fire as the prime helping load the charcoal in a cooker. When I saw that factor in the flame come up, that was rise of civilization. everything for me. Thirty-five years of grilling later, I’m still with my parents and brother every weekend cooking something on the grill. I grill three to four times a week.” A decade ago, the Big Green Egg was almost an underground “movement” in Mexico. People heard about it from a friend of a friend of a friend, but because there was no dealer in Mexico, an EGG was hard to source. “People who got an EGG bragged because they felt so lucky,” says Alejandro. “It was my dream to cook on one.” His then-girlfriend and now-wife, Gabby, made that dream come true when she gave him an XL EGG as a birthday present. “I started cooking everything on it – I grilled, I baked, I smoked, I roasted. I was in heaven.” With friends in Mexico City, the group once grilled for 12 hours straight, taking the temperature up and down, over and over, for shrimp, pork loin, rib eye steaks, quesadillas, lobsters and desserts. That ease of temperature change and control, over a long period, is the EGG feature Alejandro likes the most. Alejandro established Sociedad Mexicana de Parrilleros (Mexican Grillers Society, SMP) in 2012, with the mission to preserve, promote and celebrate Mexican culinary traditions through the joy of grilling, and became a Big Green Egg dealer. Shortly after, Alejandro and Gabby watched a barbecue cook-off on television, and he knew he needed to be in one. But being in one quickly evolved to creating one. “I searched the internet to see if there was a grilling competition in Mexico and found that there wasn’t. Just like that, we decided to create one – we really had no plan, we just did it.” The first year, the new Grill Master HEB event had 700 attendees and 13 competition teams. The most recent one, held in Monterrey, had 28,000 attendees and 100 competition teams, who compete for three million pesos in cash and other prizes. Teams came from the U.S., Argentina, Chile and Venezuela, in addition to areas throughout Mexico. The weekend-long competition is as much festival as cooking competition, with foosball and domino competitions, a kids’ competition, live music, even a dog agility contest. “We cooked five-and-a-half tons of food for attendees last year,” says Alejandro. “We cook on grills and in pits – beef, suckling pigs, suckling goats, tacos, tortas, dessert. We even cooked 1,500 pounds of paella.” Much like the Big Green Egg’s EGGtoberfest, held in Atlanta each October,
