Last summer (was it that long ago?) I interviewed my good friend and breakfast accomplice Anton Ptak about traveling in South America. If anybody has the breakfast bug, it's Anton.
V: Like, “pastry”-eria?
A: Yeah– that’s a good translation. But it was more typical to eat them in the afternoon, so if you wanted a donut, you’d have to wait until the afternoon.
V: That’s harsh dude.
A: Yeah, it was tough. You had to get used to that.
V: Did you find yourself roaming the streets, thinking to yourself, “Aaah, why can’t I get my morning donut and coffee?”
A: I DID. I had to convert my morning wants other things. Like savory things. And then save the coffee with – around 5:00 or 6:00 ish, people might need a little something.
V: Was this across the board in South America, or would the schedule of things be totally different in, say, Argentina, for example?
A: Well, that aspect was fairly consistent. People would eat little sweet things early, but not later. You wouldn’t go to a bakery and get something like that [during the day].... When people said “breakfast”, it usually meant just like instant coffee with some crappy bread and butter, and maybe some jam, and maybe some eggs if you’re lucky.
V: So they didn’t really celebrate breakfast as a meal like we do here.
A: No. Like the concept of us having brunches here [in the US]. You didn’t that see at all. People would not do something like that. If anyone did anything like that, it was late enough in the day to be more lunchy or dinner-type foods. Never would you find such a huge variety – like when we have a brunch with fruit, and there’s some kind of eggy savory stuff, and some kind of sweet stuff -- that’s a foreign concept. It doesn’t exist down there.
V: Okay – we’re sitting here at Mel-O-Glaze Bakery, and we’re eating donuts. Are there places where you could go and sit down and eat donuts?
A: Sometimes you get them on the run – like in Quito there’s this street kind of by the bus terminal, by Aquil. And there were a couple places that had this kind of stand. By the way --it's as if they heard the word “donuts”, and heard the word “dough-nah”, and that’s what they say: “donas”. Anyway –there’s this little sign in this little street cart, and it had bunch of donuts in a little window. They were actually… pretty good, for donuts.
V: But would you recognize them as a donut as we would here?
A: Yeah, you’d say, “Hey, that’s a donut." I was in another town where I had a chocolate-covered donut that was fairly good, a bit north in a town called Ibarra.
V: In Ecuador?
A: Yeah, it was in northern Ecuador, in the mountains. It was pretty good, but that’s about it. There weren’t many places you could find donuts. In Peru, sometimes they had these donuts – and I’ve seen these in Ecuador too – and the presentation was like “Wow! That’s a donut?” because it was like a donut sliced and filled with this creamy stuff.
V: Like an eclaire?
A: Kind of like that. And then it was topped with chocolate, and maybe some berries. But it always looked waaaay better than it was, because when you actually bit into it, the dough was all kind of bready, and wasn’t very sweet, and it wasn’t very good at all. It was a big disappointment actually. I had one of those at a bakery in Peru, in Lima maybe, and I kind of learned my lesson. But Peru had their own variation on donuts. I don’t know what its roots are, maybe I should look into it, but they’re called piccarones.
V: Does that mean anything?
A: Well picare means to “snack”, like eat bits of food….
V: Do they have holes?
A: They do. They make this batter… I asked this person what they put in it, and the only ingredient that was kind of interesting was sweet potato. But I don’t know, recipes are hard to get out of people, because they just know what they make – a lot of people don’t actually know the recipe....
But anyway, there's a big bowl with this batter in it, and they take it out with their hands. It's not really a liquid, but just becoming solid. They take some out, form it into a disk, kind of put a hole in it, and toss in into the hot oil, or fat, as it probably is. Then they fry them. It's kind of like a wok. I don’t know what kind of oil, but it could just be a hunk of lard, too. They fry them usually four at once, which is the standard portion for piccarones, and they take them out with this long stick, they just kind of poke them through the holes. Then they hang them up for just a second, to let the oil drip off, and put the piccarones in this little bowl they give you. And finally they pour over this miel de cane, which is just raw sugar sugar syrup, which they make.
In Peru, they were really good. I stayed with a family for a week, and I studied a little bit, and I was talking to them about how I really like donuts and stuff, and this guy said ,“You've got to go try piccarones – because that’s what donuts are here. There’s this park, and you go to this one corner, and there’s this tent. And they’ve been selling them there for years and years and years, and they’re the best piccarones in town."
V: How did you find a family to stay with?
A: It was through an organization. Rachel had to go back home for a couple weeks, and I thought, well, maybe I’ll stay in this town. They had a bunch of classes that you could study for a week, so I just thought, well, I’ll take some Spanish classes. And then I thought it would be kind of fun to stay with a host family. They were actually really friendly, a great host family. They gave me a lot of good pointers on stuff to do around town. And the husband -- I think he was a bus driver. He was not the dominant force in the family by any means. He would watch TV a lot, didn’t really say a lot, took orders from his wife …. but he told me where to go to get these donuts.
I ended up there after a long meandering afternoon trying to get to the outskirts of town and see some rock formations. Along the way I asked maybe 20 different people directions to this park. Because they all kind of give you directrions, and directions are they same way as recipes, they’re not very good instructions. So you ask somebody, and then you kind of go in the direction that they indicate. And then you ask somebody again. And they always tell you, “a few blocks” and it turns into twenty, and like five minutes actually means “a half an hour”, but eventually I got there. It was this really nice park.
Oh wait…that was a different time getting piccarones. That was my first time getting piccarones. That was in the afternoon. This was a place that he also told me I could get donuts there.
V: I don’t mean to derail the story – but, you seem to have gone to extreme measures to find donuts. Were you just jonesing for donuts, or what?
A: Well, these piccarones were supposed to be like a local delicacy -- something I hadn’t seen before. I had heard about these things that were kind of related to donuts, so I wanted to check them out
V: If you hadn’t heard about them, would you have tried so hard to seek them out?
A: Probably not. I mean, maybe I could have stumbled acrtoss them. A lot of times you just have to probe. Sometimes you’ll find out interesting things, like “oh, they have this local variety of donuts called piccarones…”
Anyway, that tent that this guy was telling about -- I went there – I went to that park after class one day, and sat down next to these three elderly women. They were all dressed really ricely, and were all proper, and they all had they little bowls of piccarones in front of them. I had talked to them a little bit – they were just curious as to why I was there. I don’t think they get a lot of foreigners going to the tent.
I asked the guy [that worked at the tent] how long they had been there, and the family has been selling piccarones, on that corner, for 50 years. And I think they’re there every single night.
V: Is night the main time to get piccarones?
A: Yeah, like after 5 pm.
V: And do you have to eat them fresh?
A: Well, yeah, they always make them fresh. You order them, then they make them, so they always really fresh. And they’re really very good. They were by far the best I had. And you get four for just under a dollar (USD). They were a good deal. But yeah, kind of a nice variation on donuts. Very fried – but nice and soft. The sugar syrup is pretty cool. Just cane sugar and water boiled down.
V: What about the dough itself? Was it sweet?
A: ummm.. yeah. It was kind of hard to tell because they do absorb a lot of the syrup from the get-go. I got them one other time later, in some other town, from a woman with a steel drum. It was like a barrel of charcoal, with like a wok on top of that. She was just making them up in the park, at night. That’s kind of where they were popular -- in the parks, at night. Or in the afternoon, if you’re lucky. A lot of people hang out in the parks at night. And in Peru there's not a very long siesta -- this is a lunch that maybe lasts two hours, but they don’t -- so after about 6 o’clock people start filtering into the parks. They’re just hanging out, smoking, drinking, sitting around.
The cool thing about piccarones, is that I found them twice in Chile as well! The regions -- which are provinces, like our states -- are numbered, from 1 in the north, down to twelve in the south. It wasn't until I was pretty far south, in region 8, that I saw piccarones again. I was thinking, “That was a big gap to not have piccarones.” Maybe there was a lot that I just didn’t see, further north, or maybe they’re just not there, I don’t know.
In Chile, we found them in a market. We tended to go to all the markets, in all the major cities. They’re all different, they all have their own character. Anyway, in the market, there were lots of places of eat, and some would have platters just piled high with piccarones. They would take either three or six off the pile, throw them into a bowl, and give you the syrup. But they make these things swim! There was so much syrup, and the syrup was so watery, it was like a donut soup, almost. It was pretty crazy. I would have to say that I prefer the Peruvian variety. But it was nice to piccarones again. And it was still pretty interesting.
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to be continued...
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