Business feature: Beef jerky store opens in Clovis

CLOVIS - When Mauro Ojeda was growing up in Argentina, his grandparents owned a grocery store for which he would help make deliveries to people living in the countryside who did not have vehicles to travel into the city.

He made one fateful trip which years later would lead to Clovis' newest business, El Gaucho's, a store specializing in beef jerky which celebrated its opening Tuesday on 1421 N. Prince.

Ojeda told The News that when he was about 7 or 8 years old, during one of those trips to the country he met a man who was hanging jerky on a string, his first time encountering the dried meat.

"He took a piece out and gave me a piece and since then I fell in love with jerky," Ojeda said.

Later after moving to Clovis - his wife Brittany's hometown - and trying different types of jerky, Ojeda and his father Roberto decided to purchase a dehydrator to make the snack just for themselves to eat, but their creations proved popular enough to open a retail location.

"From then we started sharing with family, friends and coworkers, things like that, and they're like, 'Hey, you should sell this,' so that's how it started," Mauro Ojeda said.

Currently the Ojeda family business operated by Mauro, Roberto and Mauro's mother Lila offers seven flavors of beef jerky all made in-house - red chile, green chile, lemon pepper, salt pepper, mesquite, pickle and valentina (a Mexican hot sauce) - along with nuts, drinks and dehydrated fruits and vegetables.

Mauro Ojeda said the jerky's different flavors are all home recipes, along with some trial-and-error. He said all of the beef processing is done in-house, first being refrigerated, then sliced, vacuumed to infuse the flavors into the meat and cooked for about seven hours before being placed in air-tight storage containers before finally being transferred into the display case at the beginning of the day.

The name of the store literally translates to "the cowboy" in English. Mauro Ojeda said in Argentina he grew up in the "gaucho" lifestyle, which happens to sound an awful lot like life on the High Plains.

"It's like ranch people. You take care of your cattle, you take care of your land, you live off of what you grow," Mauro Ojeda said.

The best part of selling jerky is meeting new people, hearing their stories and seeing their reaction after trying the jerky, he told The News.

"I enjoy the fact that when I take it to people and they try it, right away their blown away by the flavor and I enjoy the fact that they get joy out of it," Mauro Ojeda said.