From Chaco to Patagonia: Drinking Aguardiente in Cipolletti
text and photos by Kevin VaughnThis story is part of a monthly collaboration with POSCO, a small Argentine company that produces vegetable-cured, hand-crafted leather shoes. Once a month, MATAMBRE x POSCO will bring a story inspired by walking in search of the simple pleasure of discovery.
The windy green forests of northern Patagonia wasn’t where I expected to find an aguardiente made from carob pods. Carob trees grow wild and abundant in the northern half of the country, particularly in the dry forests of the Gran Chaco. They drop their fruits in the beginning of summer and are collected by those who care to gather the colorful bean pods. Most tear them to pieces to ferment in water into a drink known as aloja. The more industrious grind it into a fine powder to bake breads and pastries.
They’re free and widely available — the only hindrance is your drive to pursue them.
On the edges of the new El Impenetrable National Park, I met a group of women who, in addition to building infrastructure to define the influx of tourism themselves, were gathering algarroba to inject new value into old recipes.
The pods are dried, toasted in a wood oven, and ground into a clumpy, sweet smelling flour. But the entire fruit can’t be pulverized. A leftover coarse grind is unfit for cooking but perfectly suitable for making whiskey.
Alina Ruíz, the chef responsible for the park’s food and nutrition program, initially imagined an ice cream. But as is the fate of too many indigenous ingredients, she couldn’t find an interested local collaborator. So together with algarroba collected from her farm and restaurant, she sent the leftovers 2000 kilometers south to chef, vermouth maker, and distiller Carlo Puricelli in the steppe plains of Río Negro. A little more than a year after watching the algarroba be toasted and ground, I stood in the kitchen of Del Sur, Carlo’s restaurant, to make a small batch of aguardiente (because whiskey orthodoxes complained about the absence of cereal grains) in a small copper still. The finished product is brown like butterscotch, smells vaguely of cacao, and packs the punch of a rye.
NOT A SUBSCRIBER BUT ENJOY READING MATAMBRE?
Nothing is really free. Your support pays editors, writers, illustrators, copy-editors, and translators.
BECOME A SUBSCRIBER OR SUPPORT WITH A SMALL DONATION
I only truly enjoy small towns in the generous company of someone who lives there and knows the backroads, both literal and figurative, so it was only meant to be a quick stopover. A weekend max, and away from the plains and into the mountains, like the lakes of Bariloche or the islands of Chile. But Carlo insisted that I extend my trip and stay in his childhood home. A quiet house to write with a fireplace and an indoor pool was too tempting an offer.
The valleys that surround Cipolletti produce nearly 90% of the country’s apples and pears. My week was spent between days of rest and bouncing around wineries and orchards. I tried a delicious Brut at micro cider mill Savia Bruta on a morning in which the sun crept through the apple trees and made me feel like I was skipping through an Éric Rohmer film. In most parts of the world, cider is made with the imperfect apples that can’t be commercialized otherwise, often mixing several varieties into the same press. Mauro Alejandro Perini and Agustin Buet make ciders exclusively with Granny Smith. And because they use a single variety, they hand select every single apple, careful not to bruise the flesh or break the stem, to make a cider that reflects the crisp acidity of a Granny Smith pulled right off the tree. They sent me home with a box of pears ripe for export — a special treat. The D’anjou pear is more appreciated abroad but if you find them locally, grab them. They taste vaguely of lime and have a dense flesh ideal for cooking in wine.
Later that afternoon, Carlo built a barbecue near the vineyards at Flor del Prado. Journalist Luciano Fernández rescued old vines from a maker of table wines to grow Malbec and Pinot Noir. The moist microclimate it sits on demands a late harvest in April (two months after grapes are picked in Mendoza), preferably under the moonlight. And because I had an extra few days, I hitched rides with new friends weslt to Humberto Canale, the province’s oldest winery and home to my favorite national Riesling, and Familia Schroeder, the province’s largest. We tried several wines fermented in new oak barrels and I professed my love for Argentina’s tannic red wines by complaining about how everything from Napa tastes like dessert to me. My birth certificate says California, my taste buds thirst for Argentina.
An oversight in my planning — I traveled the same week as Buenos Aires’ largest food festival — left me without my guides for a few days. I became a regular at specialty coffee shop Ribera, a café I frequented in Buenos Aires before the owner moved back to Río Negro, and slowly worked my way down their filtered brews under the midday sun. And I enjoyed warm croissants and sourdough bread from Graciela, where I was surprised to eat one of the best cremonas (a flakey puff pastry shaped like a sun) I’ve ever tried.
And although I was so disappointed by two emphatically recommended meals that I sent back full plates (I always finish my meal even begrudgingly), I found respite at a casual spot called Marga on the tail-end of my trip. The former felt lost in Buenos Aires’ circa 2010 obsession with signature cuisine and French cooking. It’s a very specific style of Argentine restaurant that belongs to no one and nothing—lots of salmon, foam, and European names—that no longer exists in Buenos Aires but defines much of the ‘gourmet’ gastronomy of the country’s interior.
In Marga, I saw a change that felt more federal. Brothers Simón and Matias Lochbaum (in the kitchen and dining room, respectively), tweeze out the best of what Buenos Aires is doing right now: Seasonal, local menus, wide-reaching spices, and serious technique without so much pretension.
I went three times. Each visit was fantastic. Local mushrooms de pino turned to paté with shoestring potatoes and fresh bread and pejerrey fish with escabeche were among my favorites. A deeply pleasurable slab of toast under generous spoons of kimchi and mussels cooked over a live fire was so potent, for a moment, it was all that existed in my world.
The wonderful thing about borrowing ideas born from concepts rather than a faraway cuisine is that young cooks like Simón have freedom to develop something deeply personal. And, often without even trying, new layers to what could be considered regional, which is often detained by tradition and a lack of confidence from diners who fear investing their deflated cash in unknown menus. But here, what appears very Buenos Aires on the surface, is deeply linked to this place.
I’m often disappointed by the lack of offerings like Marga as I travel around the country. I want more commitment to the local, more uniqueness, more bravery to try something different both by cook and consumer, alike. But this trip reminded me it’s there, if not in small measure, growing like wild mushrooms. Someone hand selects apples to make cider while another collects fallen bean pods to see what happens when it’s fused with malt. And maybe, sometimes, less is more conducive to slow travel. It means long afternoons at a special vineyard or three trips to the same dining room — soaking up a place rather than checking off boxes. If you’re willing to connect the dots and pursue people and projects, no matter how far you must travel up the map, you’ll find it.
—