Think outside the tortilla.

I just bought a loaf of Bauernbrot German rye bread from the grocery store bakery and I have to say that it is awesome. I love rye bread, light or dark or pumpernickel (hello German ancestry). I actually love any type of bread, especially when it’s freshly made. As a sandwich, toast, or simply spread with some butter, it doesn’t really matter to me. I like it all.

So when traveling to Latin America, you would think that I might go through withdrawal from all that bread we eat up here, north of the border. But I don’t. In many of the countries I’ve been to in Central America, tortillas are the carbohydrate of choice. And I love them. I don’t recall ever having a flour tortilla outside the U.S. ... that is not to say that they don’t exist elsewhere. I just haven’t been to a place where they are customary. Where I have been in Central America, the corn tortilla rules. And I dutifully bow at its feet. Sometimes the tortilla comes in slightly different forms in different countries, but corn is the main ingredient. The majority of those that I have eaten were made fresh that day, with someone’s caring hands that took the corn “dough” and pat-pat-patted the ball into a perfectly thin, round disk that was cooked over a wood fire. I can smell them now. I had a tortilla-making lesson in Guatemala at the school where I worked --- it is definitely not as easy as I thought it would be. Mine was a little more like a frisbee than a tortilla. But it was still good.

The popularity of tortillas in Central America does not mean one cannot find great bread there. While spending some time in Costa Rica, I ate bread every morning for breakfast. The host family I stayed with made the typical gallo pinto (black beans and rice mixed together) every morning for breakfast, which I happily ate and liked. But I also had bread and butter sprinkled with sugar. I’m not sure if the family typically ate bread every day, but the butter and sugar was all Dutch. My friend Sietske from the Netherlands (you previously read about her here), who was a border at the house and became my good friend, was surely the one who started that. The bread came from a local bakery and someone in the family walked the short distance every morning to go pick some up. We got thick slices, doctored them up Euro-style, and enjoyed them with some awesomely strong and rich coffee.

When traveling in Mexico with my friend Monica, we were preparing for our long bus ride back to Mexico City (you can read a bit about the bus ride to Oaxaca here). We knew we had to bring some food along since our bus ride would be long again. We decided to get some bread at a local bakery. We bought some nice looking bread and then also got some quesillo at the market, which is a very popular cheese in the Oaxaca region. Quesillo is basically awesome, unprocessed string cheese (see more about it here). In the local cheese enchiladas (hello again my wonderful corn tortillas), the quesillo was almost like shredded chicken. I don’t eat chicken and haven’t for years, but the quesillo was fantastic. So we got a ball of quesillo also. When we got hungry on the bus, we used every traveler’s friend, the Swiss Army Knife, cut some bread and made quesillo cheese sandwiches. Perfect travel food. 

On your travels to Latin America, embrace the tortilla when it is the carb of choice. It is delicious in so many ways in so many different recipes. But know that if you get a hankering for bread, you are good to go. Bread is still popular south of the border. You just have to find the right way to eat it.