Don’t miss the full interview with Karlos Arguiñano this Sunday at 8 pm Miami time on ‘In dialogue with Longobardi’
(CNN Spanish) — Chef and television star Karlos Arguiñano has been on the crest of the wave for decades. With his humor and passion for communicating, he has taught thousands of people to cook through his programs not only in Spain but also in Latin America.
Now he sits down with Marcelo Longobardi for a relaxed, affable conversation, in which he recounts with great spontaneity many anecdotes from his life: from his beginnings as a bad student who only stood out for his “peeing” (“I was the one who peed the furthest everyone in the school”, he remembers with pride) but with disastrous academic results, until his indisputable success as one of the first celebrity chefs in Spanish, going through his time working in the construction of locomotives, where he realized that he was not going to have any future.
When he was a teenager, he says, they repeated a phrase to him that was “engrained in his head”: “You will never be anything.” Now, this 73-year-old Basque born in Beasain carries with him a career of more than 30 years on television in his native country and also in Argentina, where he feels very loved. “I have always said that for me it is my second country,” he tells Longobardi, referring to the place where he worked for five years, first at ATC and then at Channel 13.
In those years he had time to observe and get to know the Argentines a lot. “The Argentines only join for the national team… they are arguing about everything else,” he says. And, when asked by Longobardi, he reflects on what they could learn from the Basques: “that you have to be constant, that you have to be honest, that you have to be compliant”.
From a dinner with Joan Manuel Serrat to stardom
How did your television career begin? Decades ago, Joan Manuel Serrat and his team went one day to dinner at Arguiñano’s restaurant in Zarauzt, the town where he currently lives, he recalls.
“After dinner, I started being funny and I had them three or four hours dying of laughter at the nonsense I was telling. And then one of Joan Manuel Serrat’s team told me “Hey, Carlos, would you be willing to make a video of jokes?”, and he, as he recalls, told him no: what he wanted was to make a cooking television program .
For him it was important to teach people to “expand the recipe book” and for people in his country to know “the good things in every corner of Spain”. Within days of that meeting a project arrived and the rest is history.
The fixation of Argentines with meat
Arguiñano says that in the kitchen he discovered his true vocation, which truly makes him happy. And he has used it as a platform to teach and help.
“Eating well is not eating too much or too expensive, it is eating varied,” he explains when the conversation turns to healthy diets, and insists on one of the mantras he has repeated ad nauseam on his television shows: “A little bit of everything and much of nothing.”
In this regard, Arguiñano remembers that, when he lived in Argentina, one day they called him from the Casa Rosada to tell him that the then president Carlos Menem wanted to have a coffee and talk with him. “I had a coffee with Menem and he thanked me for the work I was doing, because I insisted a lot in Argentina that you have to eat more vegetables, you have to eat more legumes and you have to eat more fish because the Argentine eats meat, if he doesn’t eat meat He thinks he hasn’t eaten.”
The double standard of Europe: with African refugees “there is no mercy”
During his interview with Longobardi, Arguiñano also reflects on the war. “What we are seeing is an atrocity,” he says. “I thought that it would never happen again, but at the same time I realize that we are all very supportive of all the Ukrainian refugees – it seems logical and natural to me – but nevertheless, if we see the same thing happening with blacks who we have them very close, nobody says anything at all”.
“That’s where I can’t understand how it can be that because one is blonde and blue-eyed they are treated from start to finish, which seems fair to me, and others because they are purebred blacks we put concertinas on them so they can’t pass “, deepens, affirming that for Africans “there is no mercy”.
The problem with the world, he says, is that “as almost always, the bad guys rule.” “Let’s see if the good guys finally start ruling the world and we can all hold hands: white, black, yellow and blue,” she reflects.
The chef collaborates with some social works in Latin America. Now, for example, he supports a project in Pachacútec, Peru, which provides breakfast to hundreds of children and adolescents every day. For more than 25 years he also began to collaborate with an initiative in Petare, Caracas.
And to finish, the recipe for Karlos Arguiñano flan that “brings tears”
During the interview with Longobardi, Arguiñano gave his recipe to make a flan so simple and rich that “it brings tears”. See how it is here:
Don’t miss the full interview with Karlos Arguiñano this Sunday at 8 pm Miami time on ‘In dialogue with Longobardi’
(CNN Spanish) — Chef and television star Karlos Arguiñano has been on the crest of the wave for decades. With his humor and passion for communicating, he has taught thousands of people to cook through his programs not only in Spain but also in Latin America.
Now he sits down with Marcelo Longobardi for a relaxed, affable conversation, in which he recounts with great spontaneity many anecdotes from his life: from his beginnings as a bad student who only stood out for his “peeing” (“I was the one who peed the furthest everyone in the school”, he remembers with pride) but with disastrous academic results, until his indisputable success as one of the first celebrity chefs in Spanish, going through his time working in the construction of locomotives, where he realized that he was not going to have any future.
When he was a teenager, he says, they repeated a phrase to him that was “engrained in his head”: “You will never be anything.” Now, this 73-year-old Basque born in Beasain carries with him a career of more than 30 years on television in his native country and also in Argentina, where he feels very loved. “I have always said that for me it is my second country,” he tells Longobardi, referring to the place where he worked for five years, first at ATC and then at Channel 13.
In those years he had time to observe and get to know the Argentines a lot. “The Argentines only join for the national team… they are arguing about everything else,” he says. And, when asked by Longobardi, he reflects on what they could learn from the Basques: “that you have to be constant, that you have to be honest, that you have to be compliant”.
From a dinner with Joan Manuel Serrat to stardom
How did your television career begin? Decades ago, Joan Manuel Serrat and his team went one day to dinner at Arguiñano’s restaurant in Zarauzt, the town where he currently lives, he recalls.
“After dinner, I started being funny and I had them three or four hours dying of laughter at the nonsense I was telling. And then one of Joan Manuel Serrat’s team told me “Hey, Carlos, would you be willing to make a video of jokes?”, and he, as he recalls, told him no: what he wanted was to make a cooking television program .
For him it was important to teach people to “expand the recipe book” and for people in his country to know “the good things in every corner of Spain”. Within days of that meeting a project arrived and the rest is history.
The fixation of Argentines with meat
Arguiñano says that in the kitchen he discovered his true vocation, which truly makes him happy. And he has used it as a platform to teach and help.
“Eating well is not eating too much or too expensive, it is eating varied,” he explains when the conversation turns to healthy diets, and insists on one of the mantras he has repeated ad nauseam on his television shows: “A little bit of everything and much of nothing.”
In this regard, Arguiñano remembers that, when he lived in Argentina, one day they called him from the Casa Rosada to tell him that the then president Carlos Menem wanted to have a coffee and talk with him. “I had a coffee with Menem and he thanked me for the work I was doing, because I insisted a lot in Argentina that you have to eat more vegetables, you have to eat more legumes and you have to eat more fish because the Argentine eats meat, if he doesn’t eat meat He thinks he hasn’t eaten.”
The double standard of Europe: with African refugees “there is no mercy”
During his interview with Longobardi, Arguiñano also reflects on the war. “What we are seeing is an atrocity,” he says. “I thought that it would never happen again, but at the same time I realize that we are all very supportive of all the Ukrainian refugees – it seems logical and natural to me – but nevertheless, if we see the same thing happening with blacks who we have them very close, nobody says anything at all”.
“That’s where I can’t understand how it can be that because one is blonde and blue-eyed they are treated from start to finish, which seems fair to me, and others because they are purebred blacks we put concertinas on them so they can’t pass “, deepens, affirming that for Africans “there is no mercy”.
The problem with the world, he says, is that “as almost always, the bad guys rule.” “Let’s see if the good guys finally start ruling the world and we can all hold hands: white, black, yellow and blue,” she reflects.
The chef collaborates with some social works in Latin America. Now, for example, he supports a project in Pachacútec, Peru, which provides breakfast to hundreds of children and adolescents every day. For more than 25 years he also began to collaborate with an initiative in Petare, Caracas.
And to finish, the recipe for Karlos Arguiñano flan that “brings tears”
During the interview with Longobardi, Arguiñano gave his recipe to make a flan so simple and rich that “it brings tears”. See how it is here: