Breakfast! Arepa stuffed with butter and white cheese

Maize is getting such bad press at the moment in the United States.  But it is such a wonderful grain, so flexible, so many appealing products.

Arepas, as you doubtless know, are the national dish, the daily bread of Venezuela (and other parts of Latin America).  I’d had the Panamanian variety last year and was rather underwhelmed.  They were silver dollar sized, rather tough, and rather greasy half inch pancakes.  I only had the hotel version so I may have completely missed what may be wonderful Panamanian arepas.

Arepas and Venezuelan culture. Photo of photo by Miguel Dorta

The arepa above, however, made by Miguel Dorta of the University of Venezuela in Caracas, with arepa flour he had brought with him to the culinary nationalism conference in Guadalajara, was stunning.  He simply mixed flour, water and a bit of salt into an English-muffin sized patty and toasted it on each side in a frying pan (the only implement available in the hostel where we were staying).

Miguel Dorta stuffing arepas

The outside, the concha or shell is crunchy.  The soft, white inside (on the right of the photo) is scooped out to make room for the filling of butter and mild white cheese. Miguel used queso oaxaca.   A wonderful mix of textures and flavors.  Especially with the agua fresca of lime and piloncillo (raw sugar) that you can see front left (I need to ask him the Venezuelan name again). Edit. Papelón (piloncillo) con limón. Thanks to Ana in the comments.

Miguel explained that the soft inside is given to small children and old people. When he was young, he and his siblings fought for the crunchy outsides.

Arepas are eaten with all meals with and without stuffing and with all kinds of different stuffing.  Their texture is quite unlike cornbread and corn cakes. Much finer.  And no, Wikipedia to the contrary, this is not like a Mexican gordita except in size and shape.  The taste (not nixtamalized) and texture (much finer), and color (much whiter) are distinct.

Miguel has a fascinating book in draft about the preparation of the meal (flour) for arepas and its complex historical development that involves pounding, grinding, African techniques, and Venezuelan and American manufacturers.  That’s for another post.

I’ve not seen arepa flour on sale in Mexico but you can certainly get it whereever there are Venezuelan immigrants. I saw it in Spain and it must be available in many parts of the United States. Edit.  It is. Again thanks to Ana.

That’s an interesting question.  But in my opinion it is a mistake to tie it to discovering how to make bread or beer.  If you look at my original post, you will see no reference to farming.

Surely, some considerable mastery of grains has to precede grain farming by a significant period?  Why in the world would people go to all the trouble of farming grains if they did not already have techniques for turning them into food?

Onkel Bob’s response, I suspect would be turning grasses into food is easy.  To quote “grasses could be easily prepared without substantial effort. Just add fire.”

I like the phrase “just add fire” because that’s what our ancestors, who thought of fire as a thing, an element, that entered into chemical combinations, would have thought they were doing.

I’m not so happy about the “just” though.

What about the classic paper by Gordon Hillman of University College London where he studied contemporary Turkish ways of turning emmer wheat (that is a wheat typical of the early wheats in that it is enclosed in a hull) into bulgur (the form used in tabbouleh for example)?

Result.  From harvest to getting the wheat ready to process.  14 steps.

(Threshing, primary winnowing, coarse sieving, medium coarse sieving, storage, parching, pounding, secondary winnowing, medium coarse sieving, fine sieving, washing to semi-clean, storage, second fine sieving, hand sorting)

From ready to process to bulgur. Another 5 steps.

(Par-boiling, sun-drying, bran removal, winnowing, cracking, and sifting).

Although these numbers vary slightly depending on whether you count multiple sievings or winnowings as one or several steps, what food scientists call post-harvest processing is a tedious, meticulous, time-consuming, energy-consuming operation.

In the distant past people might have gone about this in a more rough and ready way.  But there’s nothing to suggest it was easy.

Soon.  A cook’s eye view of the grains.

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No pdf for Hillman’s paper but here is the reference. Hillman, G. C. (1984) Traditional husbandry and processing of archaic cereals in modern times. Part I, the glume-wheats. Bulletin on Sumerian Agriculture 1, 114-152.

Dorian Fuller, also of University College London, does very interesting work on grain history.  I now discover he also has a blog.

Thanks to Fred James for this.

I’m just tagging along on this one.  I would say that juice is the wrong word though.  This is a nice little mongrel of an agua fresca, poised between a straight fruit agua fresca and a melon seed horchata (click on my categories for lots and lots on these subjects).  Real household economy in the good sense.

Canteloupe Juice

I am taken back to English pubs in the west country before urbanization and gastropubs hit, when there was bread and cheddar and scrumpy.  Scrumpy, a local cider, alcoholic of course, actually very alcoholic sometimes, had that tingle that taste.

But I’m drinking tepache. So what’s tepache?  It’s a Mexican drink.  If you are a visitor, you might see it on the outskirts of towns, a wooden barrel with TEPACHE in wobbly red letters, under the awning of a little cart, or in a market as here, with the 30 cent offering in plastic bags and  and the rather more expensive in plastic glasses.

The signs say “Tepache 100% natural de piña”  or made from 100% natural pineapple.  It comes from the signature barrels under the table.  It’s been sweetened, I think with piloncillo, raw sugar.  It’s tasty but a bit sweet for my taste.

Tepache is also commonly made at home.  It’s not difficult and it’s actually a great trick for using up that mountain of trimmings and core that always result from preparing pineapple.  You just take the lot (making sure of course that you washed the outside before trimming), put them in a glass container (plastic is not good for this), add water and wait four or five days.

This is day one.  Day two sees bubbles, day three and four the jar looks increasingly murky, and perhaps even develops bits of mold on the top.  Never fear, carry on, strain the liquid and throw away the pineapple.

What you have is this: a nice glass of unsweetened tepache.

Tingly, sour, refreshing I much prefer it to the sweetened version.  And so reminiscent of scrumpy.   But it seemed to me just coincidence–a Mexican pineapple drink and English cider–until I was pulling everything together for this post.

I went back to the original recipe that Dr. Ramiro González of  Guadalajara gave me.  Along with his note that the enzymes in tepache made it excellent for drinking with heavy food, he added, words to the effect that it could also be made with apple or quince peel, something I have never seen in a Mexican cook book.

And then I remembered the bottle of cider from the north of Spain that I buy in the wine store chain Europea occasionally when I am homesick for scrumpy at the ridiculous price of US$ 7 a bottle.

.

Bingo.  there is the barrel.   We’ll never know.  Did the Spanish find an indigenous pineapple drink that they liked because it reminded them of cider?

Or did the northern Spanish cider drinkers begin making their drink in the New World, first with the familiar apple and quince that could be grown in the mountains of Central Mexico, then as an economical way of using all the pineapple brought up from the hot country on mules and hence very expensive.

Influence or convergence?

Anyway, tepache is great stuff.

And PS.  If you leave it a bit longer, you have a nice mild pineapple vinegar.

I enjoy ginger beer, and once I located excellent ginger roots, first in Mexico City’s Mercado San Juan, then, on occasion in Pátzcuaro’s mercado, I experimented with making iginger beer.

Besides the basic recipe, covered on my kitchen blog, http://mexkitchen.blogspot.com/2008/05/ginger-binger.html

(Aside: IMO, apound of sugar ma be far too much sweetener for a gallon of water. I also prefer to use light or medium brown sugar, so that the ginger beer has a golden color when finished.)

I also started making spice infusions or syrups, with, for example, a base of piloncillo syrup plus dried tangerine peels, freah lime, cinnamon sticks, Sichuan peppercorns, and small, dried red hot chiles and more ginger.

After the first fermentation of the basic ginger beer, I keep it refrigerated about 12 hours. After drinking off about a pint, I add a little of the spiced syrup to the fermenter (a 2.5 liter refresco bottle), then top it with purified water. Then it’s left out for a second fermentation. At that point, it really hits its stride.

Saludos,
Mike

A final note.  Go to this Wikipedia article and you will find out all about the real ginger beer plant and ginger beer fanatics.

On our regular drives to Mexico City two hundred and fifty miles away, we pass pig truck after pig truck.   It’s often made us idly speculate about what it takes to supply Mexico City with pork.

Well, in the wake of the swine flu panic, I did a bit of poking about.  Here are a few figures.  I’m just trying to get order of magnitude estimates here, so these are all rounded off.

Number of people living in Mexico City  20 million

Average pork consumption per week 1/2 lb

So Mexico City needs 10 million lbs of pork weekly

Dressed weight of a pig    200 lbs

In short, Mexico City eats its way through 50,000 pigs a week

50,000 pigs a week.  Just think about it.  Breeding them, raising them, transporting them, killing them, cutting them up, turning them into chuletas and milanesas and salchichas and carnitas and chorizo and chicharrón.

And much as Mexicans like all these porky things, they are far from being the world’s champion pork eaters.   The Danes and the Spanish eat six or seven times  as much per capita, the Americans three times as much, even the the Japanese eat twice as much.

Is it any wonder that pig farmers don’t have the animals roaming the fields? That pig farming is on an industrial scale? That it is big business?  That the backyard pig is not the answer?

So what is the conclusion?  If we want to eat pork and all the wonderful things made from pork, we are going to have to come to terms with large scale production.

More to come on this once I’ve poked about a bit more.

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I like to get the industry point of view so I have signed up for newsletters from Pork magazine.

Just a couple of weeks late, here’s a very special agua made just once a year for Viernes de Dolores, the Friday before Good Friday.  Although officially this day is in memory of the many sorrows of the Virgin Mary, in Guanajuato it’s one of the biggest festivals of the year.  The photo above shows a traditional altar with an image of Mary, cut paper, sprouting wheat, white cloth, aromatic flowers and herbs, and gold-painted bread rolls (bolillos) and oranges.

These are put up in the entrances to public buildings, offices, and as in this case private houses.

People also offers family, friends and passersby water ices (nieves) and this agua.  It’s often made in huge containers such as clean, five gallon paint cans or tamale steamers.  But here’s a small scale version for an ordinary water pitcher.

Begin by grinding up a raw beetroot with a little water in a blender.  Some people just chop it but that does not give such a vivid color.

Then chop into 1/4 inch cubes a cup of strawberries, half a small papaya, half a small cantelope, a couple of oranges, and a couple of bananas.

Then finely shred half an iceberg lettuce.   Half fill your pitcher with water and stir in half a cup of sugar until dissolved.  Strain  the beetroot water into the pitcher.  Then add the lettuce and the fruit and stir until mixed.

Of course as you can see, the fruits float to the top so give it a good stir before serving.  It should be neither very sweet nor very acid, the flavors coming from the ingredients.   You don’t need a spoon but there’s nothing to prevent you using one if you want to.

Guadalajara Pantry

To start with, here’s a drawing of a pantry in a Guadalajara hacienda, 1940s or 50s I would say.  It from a book by Maru Toledo who is well known in Guadalajara for her programs on food and cooking.  The book, La comida en casas de techos altos: Rescate de tradición oral en Xalíxco (self-published, 2007)  is a semi-fictional account of hacienda cooking.  It’s absolutely full of fascinating tidbits and I will be referring to it often.

Haciendas out in the country had large numbers of people to feed–the family and the manager, and visitors–and no hope of popping out to the store.  Cooking became very much a matter of ringing the changes on a small number of basic long-lasting ingredients.

So here you have the store room.  I’d like to blow it up larger but then it spills on to the side matter on the blog page.  Sad to say, there’s no key or description but here’s how I interpret it.

Anyway it’s cool and dark with high ceilings and light and air filtering in from a high window.

Hanging from the ceiling is a woven cage (you can still buy these in old fashioned stores, note to self, get one) for putting meats and the like.

On the right wall hangs a big copper pot.  Below it I would guess are zinc fronted safes for cold meats, cheeses and so on and below them, two big calabazas and sausage, chorizo or longaniza I’d guess.

On the back wall, top to bottow are sacks of maize, flour and frijol, below them jars with (guessing again) oil, vinegar and pickles, dishes, and pitchers.  Then comes a shelf with clay cazuelas, the blender, the mixes, the grater, the pressure cooker and three boxes titled Regel, Wisconsi and Vasco (any guesses)?.  And on the floor, bottles of Aga (?), sacks of sugar, a palm fan for the fire, the metate, and a big pile of calabazas/chiles?

On the left wall are drawers for slat, beens, rice, panocha (raw brown sugar), maize, sugar, and something I can’t read.  Below DDT, Flit (love those), flour, garbanzos, habas, pasta and wheat.  Water jugs on the floor.

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I was prompted to write this post by Judith Klinger.  She’s never afraid to speak her mind which is why I like her blog.

In a recent post, she begins to examine some of the assumptions that underly the recent fad, that probably most American readers have noticed, for living for a week off the products already in the kitchen.   As Judith notes, in many parts of Italy, a large bursting fridge is just not an option.  It would blow the circuits.

And contrast her passing comment, that the basic stores in the kitchen are dried spices, with the predominance of grains, flours, and beans above.

If  you have any pictures or descriptions of historically-interesting home food storage that you’d like me to post, please do send them.

I have loved the rich fruity aroma of guavas and the sweet pulp ever since I first tasted them in Nigeria too many years ago to think about.  Not everyone does.  My husband will sniff and say what’s that smell? in a disparaging tone any time I have them in the kitchen.  His loss, I’m afraid.

They make a lovely agua but it does require some messing about with strainers.  So this first agua de guayaba is a quick cheat.  It’s not as good as an agua made from fresh fruit but sometimes people turn up and you need to offer something in a hurry.  And to my mind it’s still lots nicer than a canned soft drink.

Juice companies in Mexico offer “nectar” as well as “jugo” (juice).  Nectar is thicker and appears to have more of the fruit pulp as well as added sugar (of course).  Here I’ve emptied a bottle of Nectar de Guayaba into a pitcher.  The drunken tilt comes from perspective problems in my small apartment kitchen in Mexico.   I will simply top that up with water and there’s my near-instant agua de guayaba.

By the way I had mentioned I was talking about agua fresca on the Splendid Table.  Last night I finally had a chance to listen to the program.  Lynne Rossetto-Kaspar and her producer Sally Swift did a great job of reporting the effervescent Mexico City culinary scene.  Here’s the download link.

http://download.publicradio.org/podcast/table/2009/02/28_splendidtable_64.mp3