The Caribbean · Volume 45, The Arepa Coast, the Hallaca and the Titoté
Arepa de huevo
Luruaco, Atlántico, and the whole Colombian coast
Illustration
- Time
- 45 minutes
- Researched
- Researched from 92 sources in the brief
Luruaco, a town of about 22,000, has held a Festival de la Arepa de Huevo every June since 1988. The historian Tomás Cervantes credits Pabla Melgarejo Manotas, who sold fried food at Las Cuatro Esquinas from about 1940; the traditional maker Guadalupe Muñoz Solano says it was Máxima Manotas, who learned it in Cartagena and brought it home, and that Pablita copied her; a third account names Rosa Amelia Montero. El Tiempo says the arepa is two hundred years old, which its own 1940 date argues with, and the academic Ivonne Bohórquez Castro reads it as a creolisation of the Tunisian brik carried by Syrian and Lebanese migrants. We give all of them and choose none. The dough weights are from the recipe El Tiempo printed, which it takes from a recipe portal and which uses precooked flour; the Ministry of Culture's own wording leaves the salt, the oil and the filling open. The times and the temperature are the press's.
As tradition built it
Makes 6. About 45 minutes.
Ingredients
- 150g precooked white maize flour, or ground white maize
- 240ml (1 cup) hot water, for the precooked flour
- to taste salt, in the dough
- 1 tbsp sugar, in the dough
- 6 eggs
- for deep frying oil for deep frying
- as needed minced beef cooked with onion, pepper, garlic, carrot, cumin and tomato, for the filled version
Method
- Make the dough with the salt and a little sugar, adding 240ml of hot water if it is precooked flour, and shape it into flat discs.
- Heat the oil for deep frying to 180 degrees Celsius and fry a disc 2 to 3 minutes, until it puffs and floats. Lift it out.
- Cut a slit at the edge and pour a raw egg into the pocket, with a spoon of the minced beef cooked with onion, pepper, garlic, carrot, cumin and tomato if it is the filled kind. Press the slit closed with a little dough.
- Fry again 2 to 3 minutes until the egg has set. Drain and eat hot, with suero or a salsa.
What a modern chef changes
The pocket guaranteed
Rung 4
Method
- Roll the discs to an even 5 millimetres with a pin between two sheets of plastic, which is why one puffs and another does not.
- Fry at 185 degrees in a deep pot with a thermometer, and lift the disc the moment it floats, before the crust hardens.
- Crack the egg into a cup and slide it into the pocket with a funnel of baking paper; seal with a dab of raw dough pressed with the back of a spoon.
- Serve with suero costeño or, failing it, soured cream thinned with buttermilk and salt.