Pizza with the Morales family

A few weeks ago, I had a day off from work after having had a training canceled. Looking for an activity for the day, I offered to help a friend of mine - Ruben - bake bread for his family's store; something he oversees everyday, managing the business and taking on the bakers role when he doesn't have class in the capital. Having fresh bread every day is one of the luxuries I enjoy here, and it's tradition for most Guatemalans in my town to have bread with coffee before dinner every night. One person told me she simply cannot eat unless she's had her sweet bread and coffee (also VERY sweet).



On that day he was planning to do it alone, so i gladly offered to help, not quite realizing what i was getting myself into. As you can see below, making bread for a store involves large quantities, not to mention muscle. Huge masses of dough with varying proportions of sugar, flour, yeast, lard, baking powder were not exactly what i had imagined upon offering to help. I imagined myself in a quaint apron, with a few strategically placed flour smears on my face smiling as I extracted perfectly browned loaves of bread from the oven, warranting a pat on the back from Ruben. This, as you can imagine, was not the case.



We started by determining how many pieces of sweet bread (Pan Dulce in Spanish, note: in no way related to the sweet bread made famous by Hannibal Lector) how many pieces of Tostado (similar to cookies), how many cubiletes (bread cupcakes, my favorite) and how many loaves of french bread. Ruben started by mixing the ingredients in what looked like a feeding trough and slapping the well mixed mass onto the bread table. He estimated that it weighed 75 pounds (I let him handle that). We kneaded each set of dough for about 15 minutes, and formed the dough into the various shapes and molds that Ruben had established as part of the bakery's daily repertoire. They were remarkably similar, just varied in certain techniques that he had researched when he decided to start the bread business. I got a little frustrated rolling consistent sized dough balls and perfectly swizzling the pretzel shaped cookies he had invented - but i did master the croissant technique and the art of the anise bread. All in all it was a great learning experience, and a hard day's work. We used a total of 125 pounds of flour throughout the different mixtures, ending up with a total of 900 pieces of bread, cookies, cubiletes and loaves of french bread.



The best part of the whole day was once we finished baking - enjoying a few pieces along the way - we were able to take advantage of the already fired-up brick oven to make homemade pizza. Pizza has become something of a tradition with Ruben's family, and we've recruited most of his siblings, nieces and nephews and even his mom to eat with us on occasion. Everyone likes to help around the preparation table to be able to enjoy the pizza when it comes out perfectly baked from the brick oven. One of the most special things about the oven they use is that their father had it built over 30 years ago in that part of the house for use in making bread, but it´s one of the few brick ovens that remain in the town. People around the neighborhood know that they continue to bake with that method and prefer the bread they bake, if not for the taste then simply for the tradition. I have friends who make a point to come over when we make plans to bake pizza in the brick oven; it's a tradition we can really get behind :)



Until next time!