Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia · Volume 08, The Reducción, the Fiesta and the Fishing Stone

Titiyas

Name: Titiyas
Yield: Serves 8 to 10
Cuisine: Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands
Ingredients: 3 cups flour; 4 tsp baking powder; ⅓ cup sugar; ¼ tsp salt; ¼ cup salad oil; ¾ cup milk

CHamoru, Guam, Spanish-derived

Titiyas, CHamoru grilled flatbread: a round pale golden flatbread with faint grill markings and small charred blister spots, sliced into wedges fanned slightly apart on the dark linen.

An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.

Time: Not statedNo source states a time and the atlas has too few comparable dishes to estimate one.

Researched: Researched from 44 sources in the brief, none yet linked in the text
Reviewed: Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
Cooked: Not yet cooked and reported

The name is a CHamoru-phonetic adaptation of the Spanish "tortilla," settled into its current form once Spanish rule was firmly established in the 1700s.

Three forms are named on Guam: harina (flour, sweetened), mai'es (corn) and faddang (Federico nut). The earliest documented references to corn-flour flatbread making appear in seventeenth-century Spanish missionary writing; corn, a New World crop, flourished on the islands once introduced, and the milling equipment itself, the metate and mano, came from Mexico too, CHamoru-ised into mitåte and månu.

by CHamoru, Guam, Spanish-derived

Livestock, and with it the raw material of dried beef, tinala' katne, and eventually kelaguen's meat variants, arrived with the Spanish administration in the seventeenth century; by the 1700s hunting parties travelled to Tinian specifically to catch feral cattle and pigs, descended from earlier Spanish stock, and dried the meat for shipment back to Guam to feed the garrison. Achote, the seed behind red rice, "most likely came from Mexico" through the same Spanish Pacific network; corn, the base of titiyas, is a similarly New World crop that "flourished on the islands and was easily stored in clay jars or barrels" once introduced. Both are the Columbian Exchange arriving in the Marianas by way of Spain's own trans-Pacific administration, not by direct contact with the Americas.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Flour titiyas

Serves 8 to 10. Recipe credited to Magdalena S. Taitano, 1985 cookbook.

Ingredients

3 cups flour
4 tsp baking powder
⅓ cup sugar
¼ tsp salt
¼ cup salad oil
¾ cup milk

Method

Mix the baking powder into the flour, then add the sugar, salt and oil.
Work in the milk to form a dough.
Divide into 3 equal portions and roll each out on a floured surface.
Cook on a grill over medium heat, pricking the dough with holes and turning twice per side, for 8 minutes total.
Wrap in foil to keep soft, or cook longer for a crisp, dippable texture. Slice into 8 wedges per titiyas to serve like bread.

What a modern chef changes

The grill's even heat reproduced with more control, and the dough's hydration measured rather than judged by feel.

Method

Cook on a Big Green Egg fitted with a flat griddle plate rather than an open grill, for a more even, more controllable surface temperature across the full 8-minute cook.
Weigh the flour and liquid rather than measuring by volume, for a more consistent dough batch to batch, since a flatbread's texture is unusually sensitive to hydration.

Open in the atlas: cook mode, scaling and tick off lists