This morning I ate toast made with sourdough bread stuffed with black and green olives. It was still warm from the baker’s oven. On top I threw a few scrambled eggs I fried with deliciously pungent kimchi and two different hot sauces, a sticky lava orange kumquat and jalapeño and thick, deep red sriracha. The bread was brought over via bicycle by the baker himself — a graphic designer who started making sourdough to make ends meet during the pandemic. The hot sauces were also hand-delivered by their makers: both restaurant workers who have decided to finally invest in the ideas that they never had time to develop. The eggs, although not a pandemic era project, is at least a quarantine discovery for me, brought weekly to a friend’s restaurant that they sell to friends of the house at cost. They are cage free, bright yellow and very quickly this breakfast get-up became my morning staple. And when I finish this article I’ll make milanesas with monkey head mushrooms and creamed swiss chard and spinach, from my respective vegetable dealers.
Something is changing in Buenos Aires. I wrote about this extensively for Life & Thyme a few weeks ago (you can still order your copy in print) after a chance run in with Pablo Ledesma, a friend of a friend who had been gifted an old grill top and fryer by his boss. Alongside two childhood friends, they installed a makeshift kitchen in his garage in the neighborhood of Florencio Varela in the far reaching outskirts of the city to make hamburgers and chopped beef sandwiches. To their surprise, it was an overnight success in a stigmatized working class neighborhood where few people have placed their bets on installing businesses. Suddenly, the crew was making more money working two times a week than they were five or six at their regular gigs in the comfort of their homes and minus a daily 2 hour round trip.
Much of my research was focused around restaurant workers that were suddenly facing severely reduced hours or none at all — initially scrambling to make sense of the pandemic world order and eventually finding power in crumbling structures. Together they are deconstructing and democratizing new food culture where power is typically concentrated in few hands and further isolated in a fraction of the city. What we are beginning to see now are people who were once outside of the food and restaurant world forcing themselves in; like my graphic designer turned go-to baker, or Manuel Fernandez, a physical education student turned pastry chef.
The peculiarity that Fernandez and his Vegan al rescate represents in this emerging scene is that not only is he part of a movement that is widening the food narrative but he is also part of a growing group of vegan cooks that are challenging Argentina’s meat dependent hegemonic food system while also reimagining what vegan food can be. During the pandemic, he developed a fascination with pastries and laminated doughs, buttery staples in a nation obsessed with sweets. We talked about adapting to a vegan diet in a culture that worships the total opposite, why he prefers to not put labels on his food and overcoming the pressure to have all the answers.
How long have you been a vegan?
Three years now. My sisters don’t eat meat either. Delfina is vegan and was before me and Martina, who is the youngest, is vegetarian.
Wow. Your parents too?
No, neither of them. It doesn’t have anything to do with a lack of awareness either. They know what their consumption finances. We have talked a lot about veganism so they are completely conscious of their diets and are more and more vegan with time. At home, we all usually eat together. Usually noodles with a simple tomato sauce. It’s not like my mom prepares a vegan pasta for us and bolognese for them. My mom eats pretty vegan and with my dad, it would be really weird for him to eat a hunk of meat. If we go out together to eat it’s always somewhere with a lot of options for us or a straight up vegan restaurant. If he eats something with meat, it’s probably dressed up somehow. At home, I’m sure that there is meat around here somewhere but if they are going to cook it, it’s usually covered from our view. So the conversation is definitely present and they have an awareness otherwise they wouldn’t be covering the meat when it defrosts. My sisters and I always would do a big monthly purchase of vegan snacks and stuff and my parents, after a different conversation, recently started joining in on that which is awesome.
I have recently started reaching out to more vegan chefs because I am curious about how people who grew up in a country that has such a strong connection to beef adapt. A lot of vegans I know have a really difficult time transitioning or, with the exception of cook friends, never quite develop a relationship with vegetables. How has your diet changed since you made the switch?
I’m a really bad example for this question. I was never a vegetarian. I switched one day to the next. When I started in 2017, I kicked off with the standard vegan pack (laughs) lots of milanesas made with grains. In the last three years, I have moments. There are times when I cook a lot and other times I don’t. You happen to have caught me in a moment where I just don’t have very much time to cook for myself and I just wanted the quickest thing possible. I do try to not let myself be that way for too long. I want to have space to cook and sit and enjoy but right now is not really that time.
I guess what I am trying to learn [sic] I’m trying to contextualize the vegan dining scene. I suppose this is common in lots of places with more carnivorous leanings but in Argentina the link to beef is so strong and historic and the disconnection to vegetables is equally strong. I’m not a vegan but at home we pretty much consume exclusively plant-based. I’d never go out to eat vegan because in general the choices are pretty bland. Or at least the really good vegan options are very limited. I think that is changing a little bit but I feel like in general food made for vegans with a lot of creativity is the minority and replacement meats like seitan or textured soy or at least things that look like meat sort of dominate. It just seems like there isn’t an innate understanding of vegetables, what you can do with them, the variety of flavor. What’s your take on that?
You don’t like seitan? I really like it. I like the flavor. I like the texture. I also really like tofu. I cook a lot of stir-fries with tofu. I do remember going to a lot of vegan fairs and everything was usually the same. A seitan empanada, a mushroom and seitan empanada, the base ingredients were usually the same. And whether it was delicious or not, my interpretation was usually like ok this is good and it fills me up. It’s also unfair to judge that food too much. It’s a fair. Maybe something was made in the morning and hours passed before you ate it and that influences the quality a lot. But definitely if you are looking for food with a deeper point of view, there just isn’t a lot. I agree with that. A lot of food has a very narrow point of view. I remember once being super excited about this shawarma at a fair. I imagined this really explosive flavor because it was a shawarma with yogurt, the seitan that’s marinated in all the spices that make food from the Middle East so flavorful, and I ate it and couldn’t figure out what it was I was eating. I think that is starting to change. I went to Sacro and had the opportunity to try most of the menu. There were things I really liked, things that maybe I didn’t like so much, but the experience itself was just incredible. I was talking with a friend about it who works in restaurants and he was like did you notice that nowhere in that restaurant does it say this is vegan food? It’s like here is the menu, this is the food. Most people that go likely know what they are going for, I don’t think most people stumble into a restaurant like that, but I think if someone did, they could probably have a meal without realizing all they ate was vegan. I think that is really fascinating.
(Editor’s note: Sacro is a high-end plant-based restaurant that makes global-inspired dishes and is unique in and of itself, not only for being vegan. It opened last year and was an immediate success)
I appreciate that perspective too. I think it’s more interesting to approach it that way. This is food and that’s that. I think it opens up more space to understand the essence of your ingredients. How do you approach that yourself. Do you think that here you are making a product for vegan clients?
I have never really analyzed that idea of who I am cooking for. I’m just cooking. But if we wanted to think about that for a moment, I don’t think that this is a product for vegans or non-vegans, it’s simply a product. It’s a vegan product, sure, but it’s still a product. It’s food. When you go to the vegetable stand to buy a banana, no one is telling you this is vegan. It’s just a banana and something you’ve probably been eating since you were a baby. It’s food. I make pastries. There is chocolate, there is cream. I don’t make a point to say this is vegan chocolate or this is vegan cream. I look at the vegan part as a quality it has. I don’t cook for vegans, I cook for people who want to have a really good croissant. It’s a product and it doesn’t matter that it is vegan. Putting that label or separating food into categories has always felt a little weird to me.
Were you always interested in bread and pastry making?
I always enjoyed cooking and when I went vegan I started taking it more seriously. I didn’t choose to study cooking and instead started studying physical education. This year is my fourth year, so it’s this year and the next, but I decided to drop it to pursue cooking. It just felt like my place was more here. This project started with more savory dishes but I slowly started to realize as I tried things and saw how people reacted that I was more interested in bread and pastries. One day, I’m not sure how, I saw this croissant that Chica Pajáro (celebrated local pastry chef, Olivia Saal) made and it just was like wow I want to make something like that. I had no idea where to begin, how to get started, what or how to do anything. I’m a perfectionist. I’m anxious. I am really obsessive with aesthetics. I want all the food to look beautiful. At first it was a disaster. I started reading and investigating. This has been a very long process of figuring out how to get from there to something that I really like, which I do like what I’m making now but I know that there is still a lot of room to grow. I really went nuts looking for information because there just isn’t a lot. At first the pastries were coming out like bread. They’d split at the top when they rose. I was having a really hard time working the puff pastry. I think I’ve watched every video there is on youtube. I practiced and practiced and practiced. And it just wasn’t coming out. I was doing everything I saw in the videos, all the measurements and processes exactly. I just couldn’t figure out what wasn’t working. There was just something I wasn’t understanding. Suddenly it just sort of clicked and things began coming out better. I think I sort of had to realize that there are no recipes with bread. I mean, obviously there are, but you can have all your measurements and your process down but then it has to do with how you layer, how you touch the dough, how you knead, what ingredients are you working with. It is very personal and everyone sort of ends up with their own recipe. And also I’m working in a home kitchen with a regular oven that took a long time to understand. How to manage the temperature, all the tricks so that it doesn’t burn on the bottom, when to know when to flip around the cookie sheet.
Your project is really interesting to me because pastries are incredibly important in Buenos Aires culture. How have you adapted your recipes and what has the reaction been?
This is a huge debate that I have had with myself because I had to replace butter with margarine. Nutritionally speaking, using margarine isn’t a light decision for me. I know that it is not a good thing to work with and I know people won’t buy this because of that. I had been looking for alternatives and I reached out to a Spanish pastry chef who has this incredible vegan school, and he said to me no one is eating pastries thinking about their health qualities. Pastries aren’t healthy. And veganism doesn’t equate to health either. To make this, not using margarine would be really difficult. I could use coconut oil but then you have to figure out where is it coming from, and honestly the health properties are overblown, coconut oil isn’t necessarily a healthy choice. It’s really expensive too. There is just nothing else in the market, and when I was talking to this Spanish pastry chef who makes these incredible vegan desserts, he uses margarine. There isn’t anything else. But I’m not looking to make something nutricional, I want to make something delicious. No one lives on croissants. It’s not the foundation of someone’s diet. This is a different goal. Maybe in ten years there will be an alternative that is better for our bodies but until then. Luckily I’m already having to think about expanding and I’m looking into the possibility of renting my own place to live and work with a professional oven and mixer and space to experiment with more doughs.
That makes a lot of sense. I think that humans tend to want to put everything into a binary like this is good and this is bad and there is no overflow. I think that everything has a positive and negative charge and the goal is to have a little more on the positive side, right? With veganism or anyone that is fighting for consumption that is more conscious, there is a lot of pressure of everything needing to be really healthy or everything has to have zero impact when that’s not the point or simply not possible.
Yah of course and the rest of the ingredients it’s organic sugar, organic flour and fresh yeast. There are people who have not ordered because they didn’t want to consume margarine and that’s all good. I don’t like it either and I’ve debated it a lot with myself. I’ve lost sleep thinking about it (laughs) just up at night thinking about margarine but you have to stop for a second and understand that none of us can carry the weight of the world on our shoulders. I can’t be this savior that fights for animals and saves the planet and feeds everyone super nutritional food. I agree, there is a lot of pressure on us to have the answers or the vegan that saves everything and I really struggled for a while with this idea that if I wasn’t doing something that was a perfect process, that I just wouldn’t do it. This would just be something for me and my friends, a hobby that was never put out into the world and I’ve realized that doesn’t serve anyone.