Pan de Semana Santa

Senyo Olivia invited me to her house to see how the special bread for Holy Week is made. Although almost all household work (including food preparation) is done by women here, this bread is made exclusively by the men. A few families in town have the brick oven that is needed to make this bread, and here you can see the oven heating up. After it reaches its peak heat with the fire, the oven is cleaned out quickly and the little breads are placed directly on the hot bricks, where they bake for 15-20 minutes. The recipe that is used for this bread is different from the bread eaten year-round, although no one could quite tell me what was different about it..... I guess that is one of the downsides of not being able to speak Kaqchikel here, as the bakers weren't exactly fluent in Spanish. For three days, about 500 little breads are baked each day in preparation for the Holy Week celebrations. I thought that Senyo Olivia told me that the bread is baked specially for the people who carry the "floats" that have Jesus carrying his cross and Mary through the streets in processions all throughout this week, but then she gave me three breads to take home....and since I am not baptized into the Catholic church and will not be one of the twenty or thirty people that are needed to carry each float, maybe I misunderstood what the bread is for. Either way, I promptly slathered it in butter and luxuriated in every tasty bite of pan! In my opinion, it tastes like a fresh-baked, "country white" bread - except with the additional "fresh out of the fire" taste, too. Yum!