Living by Bread Alone

For an agricultural school with acres of huerta [vegetable gardens], we sure eat a lot of starch! Just thought this little illustration would be amusing. This is “pan.” They’re little rolls we purchase in the town down the road. [Pretty sure we keep at least 3 bakers in business single-handedly.] The photo above is how much pan we go through in a single day. Each roll looks like this:

We each have two or three for breakfast [with our cocido con leche], the kids in the campo have two for mid-morning snack [again, with some cocido con leche] and we all get two in the afternoon for merienda [you guessed it, with cocido con leche.] On Sundays, we have the same thing for dinner. They’re made with white flour, kneaded to death with very little yeast, and almost flash-cooked in a huge brick oven. The outsides are hard, but not crispy and the insides chewy, yet somehow insubstantial. They’re also quite dry [hence the omnipresent cocido] but otherwise tasty—thank goodness, as each of us consumes somewhere between 4 and 8 of them a day!