Happy Easter everyone, I hope you all had a very blessed
week and had plenty of good food and good fellowship with family and friends! Last week here in Paraguay was filled with
CHIPA. Each day during holy week or
Samana Santa is filled with different activities for some days to butcher
animals, others to spend with family, spent fasting, and one of the most
important is making chipa. Everyone here
makes chipa on Wednesday and each family makes their own chipa and then shares
it with everyone else. It is kind of fascinating
but everyone has chipa and yet they are always gifting chipa back and forth
with each other so everyone just has a lot of chipa, which I guess depending on
the family is not a bad thing. The chipa
is all eaten throughout the rest of the week and is also used as decorations
around the house and church for the Easter celebration.
So by this point you are probably asking yourselves what is
chipa? I hope by the end of this blog
post you will have all the information you want to know about chipa. Chipa is a traditional Paraguayan bread made
with mandioca flour and is also known as Easter breakfast bread. Chipa can be bought all throughout the
country year round with chipa ladies entering all of the buses selling this
delicious treat which in my opinion is best hot and right out of the outdoor oven. During Samana Santa the production of chipa
goes through the roof.
I had made chipa before with many different families here in
my community but had never seen the entire process until this year. This year I was lucky enough to be able to
see the process from start to finish and it actually started more than a week
prior to actually mixing all the ingredients together. About a week prior the mandioca was harvested
(in addition to the mandioca harvested daily) and was peeled, washed and
cleaned and then was graded and laid out in the sun to dry. After a while in the warm Paraguayan sun it
dries and crumbles making a flour substance, mandioca is actually a starch so
it isn’t really flour but rather starch (for the sake of simplicity I will
refer to it as a flour).
Anyway after a
few days from harvest to drying you have mandioca flour which is then but into
bags and stored for the chipa making day.
A few days before the big day the corn is collected and hand ground 3-4
time with each time sifting out the larger pieces to be further ground and you
are left with corn meal which is the saved
for chipa making day. At this
point at least I was just overwhelmed by the amount of work just needed to prepare
all of the ingredients. Of course if you
are a family that is a little well off you can just buy all of these- mandioca
flour and corn meal but at least with the family I helped it was all done by
hand. Also
everyone makes chipa differently which makes it so unique but the best chipa is
fresh out of the oven. Below you will be able to see
pictures of step by step directions to actually making the chipa, enjoy!
First Step: Get all of the ingredients together
including:
-Mandioca flour (~ 4 kilos)
-Corn meal (~5 kilos)
-Some pig fat
-Plenty of salt
-Anise
-Lot of eggs
-Well aged cheese (at least a week is ideal)- this
is the cheese that people here make as a
way to use all of the milk everyday
-Whey- the leftovers after you make cheese
-Butter or margarine
Next
mix together the corn meal with the mandioca flour and make sure it is all well
sifted.
After the corn meal and mandioca flour is well
mixed together either you can use your hands to break up the anise or a hammer
or the like to break up the anise. This
releases a very strong odor which you may or may not like, smells like black licorice.
Once you get all the dry ingredients mixed together
you can put those in another container for the time being. Next start mixing all of the wet
ingredients. Start with the pig fat in
the bottom of the container and mix it around for a couple of minutes with your
hands to get it all smoothed out (also great hand moisturizer).
After the pork fat is well mixed then add butter or
margarine. We used two containers of
margarine.
Next we added about two dozen eggs and she claimed
that fresh farm eggs were better than eggs that can be bought in the Mercado or
the grocery store. We ended up using a
mixture of both since her chickens are not producing many eggs right now.
Then add about kilo and a half of well-aged PY
cheese. At first I was a little horrified
that this cheese had been sitting out for over a week and was covered with ants
and insects but after we washed it in water it got mostly clean. Good cheese odor though I think is what she
was going for and a little bit harder (almost looking like feta).
Mix everything very well together for about five
minutes which is a super great arm workout!
When all of the wet ingredients are well mixed add
the dry ingredients back into the large bowl.
Start mixing all of the ingredients together and it
will start to form together adding whey as needed.
With this mixture you can go on to finish making
chipa or you can also make mbeju which is also a wonderful chipa like pancake
which here is best make over an open fire.
Put a couple of handfuls of the mixture out on the
wooden table and start mixing it with your hands which requires a little bit of
practice on how to essentially smear in on the table a bunch of times which is
a fantastic hand workout. It was also
fun when we got my little niece Paola involved.
What the dough looks like once it is “smeared” a
bunch of times on the table.
You can let the dough sit a little while to take a
break or just keep going. You then take
the dough and mix it more on the table and then can form it into shapes. The traditional shape is like a doughnut but
we also got creative with different shapes, letters, and sizes.
While we were getting the chipa ready to go Alicdes
and his dad were getting the tatakua (outdoor oven) ready so when we got the
chipa ready and laid out on the banana leaves they were ready to go into the
oven. Once in the oven the chipa cooks
in about ten or so minutes depending on the temperature of the oven.
So after a long and full day of making chipa it all
came together as we sat around eating and enjoying the fresh chipa and
company. I have a much better appreciation
of how much work goes into making chipa and was able to better enjoy it after
all the hard work. Here is Paola with
the P shaped chipa I made her. I hope
you all learned a little bit about chipa and some traditional Paraguayan
food. Below you will find a link to a more
“Americanized” recipe to make chipa if you would like, it looks very yummy with
much better cheese that we have here. As
always if you have any questions please just let me know and enjoy!
