She did not know, but “there was the information, some had already come and said that it was a very beautiful area.” The couple had lived for a year in Brandsen (Buenos Aires) where some dairy farmers taught them how to make cheese.
“As a French woman, I was enthusiastic about producing them, but we spent two years in Los Hornillos making bread and then we moved to Travesía where we bought a field and four cows,” she continues. Díaz is a baker and blacksmith, which is why the first venture was that of loaves.
Already in their own field, they had the cows and the milk but not the space to park the cheeses. “We need a structure that we didn’t have,” she describes, noting that a neighbor, Ana Domínguez, advised them to go for the dulce de leche.
They started in 2009 with a pot and a wood fire. They produced about 50 kilos a week: “Little by little we put together, we added a pot with a motor so that it rotated and a gas stove. The neighbors were very supportive of us, they all helped us”.
They cook dulce de leche for 18 hours and only use milk, sugar and baking soda
The name of the brand is from the cows they had at the beginning, Manchita, Peluca and Camila. The fourth was Sonsona but “was left out”, laughs Deschamps. When in 2015 they started manufacturing artisan ice creams, they sold the cows. “We did not have a good structure, milk was not enough and we bought from the same farm as now, to which we sold the animals”, he recounts.
Shortly after starting to make the traditional, they added the varieties of chocolate, walnut, grated coconut and raisins macerated in rhum. “For the fairs it was to have one more attraction,” he says. Later we added others, some with our own ideas and others at customer suggestions”. The dulce de leche with carob and the one with mint are among the “most original, with products from the area”.
They sell in stores in CABA, in its two ice cream parlors (San Javier and Villa Dolores) and in the area
Deschamps admits that when he first tried dulce de leche it was “very sweet” and that is why some flavors emerged, such as the one with bitter cocoa and hazelnut.
With his Cordovan children, he got used to the mountains. He points out that if he had stayed in France he would surely live in the Pyrenees, not in his native Paris. “As we are restless -he adds-, we started with ice cream. We make prickly pear, peperina, lemon verbena, carob, native flavors and without anything artificial”, he affirms.
THE NATION / ARGENTINA
(GDA)
