Bollo de Pan

This is not a recipe per say but it is such a fond food-related memory from my childhood.

My grandma, Lela, lived in what was then a tiny town. To me it was tiny because I lived in Caracas where you needed a car to get around. In Villa de Cura – La Villa for short – you could walk around the town in a couple of hours. Lela’s house was strategically located across the church and the parish, which in Venezuela is a very important institution of influence for decision-making. The house was also very close to the main square where the municipality and the police station still stand.

Right beside Lela’s house was a bakery. It was owned by a family of Portuguese descent that came to Venezuela in the late 1940s. And actually, La Villa was inhabited by many different European cultures: Italians, Spanish and Portuguese that all came around the same time.

The bakery sold bread and pastries, ice cream, ham and cheeses, and ‘chucheria’ – junk food. It also sold a few other items such as toilet paper, soaps, notebooks and pens. They also made sandwiches and sold cold drinks.

Every day, they would make bread twice a day. The first one was early in the morning but the best one was the one in afternoon. That was when we would go over, get a new fresh batch, bring it home and make ourselves a sandwich with mortadella and ketchup or just spread butter for it to melt in the warm bread.

Bollo de pan is a bun, a smaller version of a baguette. If you were really hungry you could easily eat three, but if it was just a snack or you were eating just because it was freshly baked then you would eat just one.