A griddled cake made from white cornmeal, salt and water, the arepa is the alpha and omega of the Venezuelan diet. It is usually the first thing a Venezuelan eats for breakfast and often, especially after a night of carousing, the last thing she eats before bed.
Mashed with milk or butter or fresh white cheese, the arepa’s tender interior crumb is the first food, besides its mother’s milk, that an infant puts in its mouth — those first soft bites are the beginning of a lifelong habit.
The arepa has been, like the potato for the Irish or Cod for the Portuguese, not just a staple of the Venezuelan diet, but a force in their history. About five years ago, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez tried to nationalize Harina P.A.N., the white cornmeal used to make arepas and succeeded in stopping distribution of the flour. A generic, universally hated version was made available by the government.
The result was a huge black market for the real thing: Housewives would go to the backrooms of bodegas and supermarkets and buy their ration of two bags per customer, often wrapping the Harina P.A.N. in opaque cloths so its telltale yellow packaging didn’t peek through their shopping bags. And at different times of the day their daughters, daughters-in-law and maids would repeat the same exercise.
A taste for arepas in Venezuela cuts across class and regional lines. Walk into Que Arepa! in Valencia, Carabobo, on a Friday night and you might see a laborer who has scraped a few bolivares together for his only solid meal of the day sitting next to a Prada-clad sifrina daintily biting into a carne mechada-filled arepa, both of them watched by an armed guard.
An American may ask, looking at the recipe for arepas: Where is the sugar? Where’s the baking powder or the eggs? But an arepa’s virtue derives from its simplicity, its clean corn flavor and its freshness.
Go into an arepera, you will have a glimpse though the narrow service window of an assembly line of women cranking them out to order, one mixing the dough, another rolling and flattening the dough at the same time, another griddling the arepas and passing a tray of them to the counterwoman, who fills the arepas with carne mechada or butter or cheese and hands them to the waiting customers.
Several generations ago, an arepera was staffed with black women who covered their heads with handkerchiefs (the Harina P.A.N. package depicts such a woman, Venezuela’s Aunt Jemima, or a Creole cousin) and made their arepas with dried corn that was blanched, then pulverized in a stone mortar.
My wife, Yasmin’s, mother, Rosa, remembers going to an arepera as a child, and seeing the arepas cooked over a wood fire on a large clay griddle which had been seasoned with repeated coatings of lard. The arepas were first crisped on the griddle, briefly thrown directly into the flames, then much of the burnt exterior was scraped away with a piece of glass to give the arepa a faintly charred flavor.
John Broening cooks at Duo and Olivea restaurants in Denver.
Venezuelan Arepas
In Venezuela, arepas are made with precooked fine cornmeal. Harina P.A.N. is the traditional brand used in Venezuela, and is sometimes available in North America. Masarepa by Goya is produced here and it’s available in both white and yellow varieties, but Venezuelans rarely use the yellow. Do not use masa harina, which is traditionally used in Mexican tortillas. It won’t work for arepas. From Yasmin Lozada-Hissom.
Ingredients
About 1 tablespoon unsalted butter
2 1/2 cups warm water
2 cups Harina P.A.N. (or Masarepa Goya)
1 1/2 teaspoons salt (adjust salt to your taste — nobody ever measures salt in Venezuela)
Directions
Melt butter in the warm water, then sprinkle the Harina P.A.N. and salt into the water while stirring vigorously to avoid lumps.
With clean hands, work the dough for a few minutes until it is nice and smooth. Cover the dough with a damp cloth and allow to sit for 10 minutes. The dough will get firmer in that time once the corn meal’s tiny grains have hydrated.
Divide the dough evenly into 8 portions. With slightly wet hands, form dough into balls and then flatten them until they are about 1/2-inch thick (you can make them thinner or thicker if you prefer).
You can either fry the arepas or bake them. In my family we prefer to bake them. If you bake them, place the arepas in a hot comal, or cast-iron frying pan filmed with oil. Turn them once you see a slight browning on the surfaces that are touching the pan.
Once darkened on both sides, place arepas in a 350-degree oven directly on clean racks, and bake them 10 to 15 minutes, until they puff and sound hollow when you hold them in your hand and tap them. It’s a very distinct sound.
Split them in half and filled them up with a little bit of butter and queso blanco, carne mechada, black beans, tuna salad or avocados.
