The Venezuelan Bollito - A Boiled Cornflour Snack

For a typical Venezuelan breakfast, when you are short of time, try boiling your cornflour dough instead of making arepas. The resulting submarine-shaped "bollos" are ready in just 15 minutes. (photo copyright Russell Maddicks)

That white submarine at the back of the plate is a bollo (pronounced: bo-jyo), also known as a bollito (pronounced: bo-jyito).
They are made from the same dough used to make arepas, from pre-cooked corn flour.
Like many Venezuelans I use Harina Pan to make my arepas and bollos.
All you need to do is add water and knead the dough until you can shape it easily and it isn't too dry to form cracks.
Instead of forming the dough into flying saucer shapes and frying or baking your arepas, bollos are roughly shaped into submarines and boiled in water for about 15 minutes. You know they are ready when they float to the surface.
It's a really quick way to get your daily cornbread fix.
For breakfast I like to serve bollitos with perico (eggs scrambled with onions and tomatoes) and grated yellow cheese.
In some places in Venezuela, you find bollo pelon, which are bollos stuffed with minced beef or shredded chicken cooked in a sauce.
In Colombia, the bollo limpio is slightly different as the corn dough submarines are wrapped in a corn husk before being boiled.
In Venezuela this kind of bollo is called an hallaquita.
Just to confuse matters further, in Ecuador and some other Andean countries, there is a very similar corn dish called humita. These are typically made from fresh ground corn which is wrapped in corn husks and steamed, often with cheese mixed into the dough.
The ultimate bollo is the hallaca, a cornmeal-dough pocket stuffed with a host of tasty ingredients, wrapped in a plantain leaf, which is eaten at Christmas.

Related recipes:
How to Make Arepas
How to Make Perico
How to Make Hallacas 

#Venezuelan #food #bollos #hallaquitas #arepas

Recipe: Perico - Venezuelan Scrambled Eggs

You don't get plain old scrambled eggs in Venezuela. As befits a vibrant tropical country where eating great-tasting food is an intrinsic part of the culture, you get something far more exciting and colourful: Perico.

The name of the dish comes from the Spanish word for parrot, probably because the red, yellow and green of the ingredients echoes the parrot's colourful plumage. Interestingly, perico is also a slang term for cocaine (perhaps because users of the drug tend to prattle on so much about nothing in particular).

But whatever you get up to on Saturday night, perico is a fast, simple way to brighten up brunch on a grey, drizzly Sunday.

In Venezuela it is generally eaten alone with arepas (see recipe below), or in combination with bacon or ham, black beans and grated cheese.

I usually have some hot sauce handy too. Venezuelans generally shy away from incorporating chillies into their cooking but will have homemade picante sauce on the table to give an extra zing to meals.

The best perico I have ever tasted was at a small roadside stall in the wide-open plains of Venezuela's cowboy country known as Los Llanos. It was only about 10:30 in the morning but already the sun was stirring up heat swirls from the asphalt road.

We ate off battered plastic plates at a rickety table under a zinc roof and our breakfast was accompanied by a few ice-cold Polar beers from the cool box.

But what made it so memorable was that the lady serving the food had crushed chicharron - pork scratchings - into the eggs, which took the whole experience to a different level.

I hope you like my more traditional version.

Ingredients
To make perico for two people you will need:
4 eggs
2 medium-sized tomatoes
1 small onion
2 spring onions
A quarter of a green or red bell pepper
Salt
Ground black pepper
Olive oil

Preparation

1. Finely chop the onions, spring onions and bell pepper.

2. Cut the tomatoes up into small squares and remove seeds and excess juice.

3. Heat the olive oil in a medium frying pan.

4. Add the onion and when it starts to brown add spring onions, pepper and tomatoes.

5. Turn down heat and cook for about 6-8 minutes, adding salt and ground black pepper to season.

6. Break eggs into a bowl and whisk until you get bubbles on top.

7. Add eggs to frying pan and stir gently as it cooks and scrambled egg forms.

8. When the scrambled egg is ready, remove from heat and serve.

By Russell Maddicks

Recipe: How to Make Arepas

Recipe: Caraotas Negras - Venezuelan Black Beans

Recipe: Carne Mechada - Venezuelan Shredded Beef

Glossary: Eating at an Arepera

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