August 16, 2010: Birote Salado Guadalajara

Dave served his mission in Guadalajara back in the mid to late 90s. He was really skinny before his mission. Then he discovered these babies. These are Birote, otherwise known as of yesterday to me as "Beer Bread". They are very specific to Guadalajara, apparently, and one of his colleagues at work told him the real name because he had been trying to make bolillos. It's in Spanish, and then even converted it is in grams and milliliters, so it took the poor guy a long time to make them.

I call it beer bread because the recipe calls for beer. This was entertaining even in itself, since he doesn't drink beer, and has never bought beer before Saturday night. I asked my trusty neighbor what he should get and he gave me a fancy name (that I ignored because it sounded expensive). Then he said, "You could get Coors Light and be fine." Ahhh, that was familiar. Except Dave came home with Busch something or other. And then discovered that it was non-alcoholic.

Leave it to Dave.

So then he had to go back and ended up buying Budweiser. So we now have a six pack of non-alcoholic beer and a five pack of Bud. Good for slugs and snails...or birote.

These suckers take a long time to make. You have to mix all of the ingredients and THEN let it sit for 18 hours to have enough acidity. He had to count the hours so that it would coincide with coming home from Church. By the time dinner was done and the bread was done it was 9:00 pm. Almost 24 hours later and we had 5 mini-footballs of bread to show for it. Kind of like gardening when you get squash bugs.

Anyway, he forced me, literally sat me down and forced me to try the bread. And I'm on a diet (which I am always on) and it was 9:00 pm and he was asking me to eat BREAD? Is he completely insane?

I got out the butter.

And let me tell you, the calories I am going to have to burn today to make up for it makes it completely worth it. If this bread didn't take so dadgum long to make, I would have him make it for me every week and I would give up my waistline (what waistline?) for it. Instead I think it will just be one of those special occasion breads. Something to look forward to.