2023-09-24 08:00:00
September 24, 202303:00
El Búho raw serrano ham is sold throughout the country.Jade Sivori
“I started this because I fell in love with my father-in-law,” he laughs. Hector Aguero when remembering his mentor, the Spanish Víctor Fernández, originally from Santander, father of his wife and who taught him the art of raw ham. He tells it sitting at the head of a table The owl, his restaurant in Agua de Oro, north of Córdoba. There where he manufactures, serves and also markets the serrano ham that has been shipped throughout Argentina since 1948. “They are looking for me. I never needed to go out and sell,” says Agüero, who for many is the creator of the best raw ham in Argentina.
Raised in the Caballito neighborhood, in Capital Federal, he tells how he came to this corner of Córdoba. “I was here on vacation, in high school, and I ran into a school friend – San Cirano – who was passing by on horseback. He told me that here, at the Estancia Agua de Oro hotel, there was a dance. The hotel belonged to Teresa’s family, my wife, and that’s how I met her that summer. I returned the following years and always danced with her. Until one time she invited me to eat with her family and when they brought the Spanish stew… that’s where the disaster began! Men are caught by food,” says Agüero, who at that time was studying Economics and working in a tire import company in Buenos Aires. An occupation that he left to come work in the restaurant with his father-in-law and finally marry Teresa in 1969.
He says that his father-in-law, Víctor Fernández, was born in Santander, Spain, and he came to Argentina alone when he was 14, just before the Melilla War, in 1909. They put him “prepo” on a ship with America as the destination. He “He started making cold cuts because it was what he knew. He had grown up in an old house that had a basement-type farm downstairs, where the animals slept. He told me what it was like to go out to move the animals in winter, with a skin of wine and a piece of homemade bread with a slice of salty bacon. They were beaten and hard-working people. When he arrived in Buenos Aires, this was an orchard,” he says with admiration and does not stop. He “he spent some time in the Immigrant Hotel and then asked for a job in a bar downtown. He washed glasses until he started breaking them: he wanted to be in front of the counter. They let him cook and a Spaniard, who noticed his skills, took him to Mar del Plata to make cold cuts. It was the booming time of the city and he began to do great with a pantry. He was a friend of Antonio Cabrales, the coffee grower. Then he had problems with some workers and sold. Then they offered him to go to a winery in Mendoza, but on the way he passed by here, he saw the ‘for rent’ sign, the grove, the river and he stayed,” says Agüero about Fernández, who settled in Agua de Oro and revived the old hotel Estancia Agua de Oro. He raised animals in the field, fattened them and always continued working. Then he transmitted the job of curing – bacon, lomito, bondiola, hams – to his son-in-law.
“I started working with him in 1968. What is now a restaurant, back then it was a terrace with a tea room. I made the pastry. It functioned as an appendix to the hotel and we lived downstairs. In the 90s things went very badly for us because people traveled abroad, but we always continued doing the cures as he had taught me,” says Agüero, who in 1982 had had to say goodbye and bury his father-in-law. So in 1999 he converted the teahouse into a restaurant, The owl, for the animals that nested on the terrace. And he had two more restaurants in the city of Córdoba. Like his father-in-law, he always continued with the cured.
Héctor Agüero learned the trade from his father-in-law.Jade Sivori
The secret to their raw ham? “It’s easy: a lot of salt and little cold, or little salt and a lot of cold. That’s what the industry doesn’t do. My product is handmade. It always has to have a little fat, which is what transpires between the muscles and gives it its flavor,” says the expert and invites us to go to the cold room, the salting sector and the warehouse where the hams are parked. Héctor Agüero no longer raises pigs like he did a few years ago, but instead he buys their legs from a very good slaughterhouse. “I buy them with the hoof, so that they don’t contaminate me when I put the hook on them. I pay for the waste, but it’s worth it,” he says and slips that the fetas he likes the most are the ones that come out of the knuckle, the smallest ones. “The fresh leg weighs 12.5 kilos. It is given cold, salt and time and a year it weighs 6.25 kilos. Then it is boned and reaches 5,280″, he comments with the precision of a surgeon about this raw ham that has a year and a half of reserve. And he adds that the gastronomic journalist Pietro Sobra praises his hamsso much so that he made a book and a television show since The owl. He also says that for years he sold his cured meats to the Museo del Jamón and Tomo I, a former restaurant at the Hotel Panamericano, among other well-known places.
The El Búho restaurant is in Agua de Oro, north of Córdoba.Jade Sivori
The owl. Restaurant with a good menu of pastas and meats, as well as boards with the cured meats of the Agüero family. Open every day (except Thursdays) at noon and Saturday nights. For the hams, they ship throughout the country. RP 53 s/n. T: +54 9 (3513) 13-3719. IG: @jamoneselbuho
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