A brand built on Argentine fire cooking has two easy stories available to it, and both of them are a little bit of a lie. Here is what we’re doing about each.
The wood in the old asado pits was quebracho colorado — quiebra-hacha, “axe-breaker” — and it burns so hot and so long that a fire built at noon is still working at midnight. It is the obvious romantic claim for a smoked salt, and we could probably have made it without anyone checking.
The problem is that the Gran Chaco, the dry forest where quebracho grows across northern Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia, has been losing tree cover at one of the fastest rates anywhere on earth — to tannin extraction, to charcoal, and above all to clearing for cattle and soy. Quebracho is slow-growing and sits near the center of that loss. A tree that takes the better part of a century does not need another buyer with a nice story attached.
So our Sal Ahumada is cold-smoked for twelve hours over responsibly sourced oak. It tastes like woodsmoke because it is woodsmoke. We’d rather tell you that than tell you something better.
Merkén is made from cacho de cabra peppers smoked over wood and ground with toasted coriander seed and salt. It has been made this way in Mapuche communities across the cordillera — on both the Argentine and Chilean sides of Wallmapu — for far longer than either country has existed.
It is not a generic South American chili blend, and Mapuche producers have spent years working to keep it from being taken, industrialized, and sold by people with no connection to it. We are, at the moment, people with no connection to it.
So there are two honest paths and we are only interested in the first: source from a Mapuche cooperative, put their name on the jar next to ours, and pay terms that make it worth their while. Or don’t make it. Merkén is listed on this site because we intend to do the first thing. It will not be produced until we have.
Oregano from the Córdoba sierras. Paprika from the Río Negro valley. Ají molido sun-dried on the ground for weeks in Catamarca and Salta, which is why it tastes fruity where force-dried chili just tastes hot. Where we cannot yet name a farm, we name the region, and we say why.
Fourteen of the twenty blends are built from the same eleven raw materials. That is deliberate. It means we can know our growers rather than our brokers.
