Hot Pandesal

We Filipinos love, love, love to eat. I even read one article written by a foreign observer that Filipinos love to eat so much that you cannot walk for 5 minutes on the streets of Manila without seeing another place that sells food (and this encompasses all types of food places from classy restaurants to fish ball vendors). We even have five or six meals in a day, breakfast, mid morning snack, lunch, mid afternoon snack and dinner (for some, even a midnight snack). Needless to say, we Filipinos have had a lingering and sweet love affair with food. Having said all this, it’s a no brainer that one of the things mostly missed by Filipinos who live outside the country is the FOOD, Filipino style. I am in no way a food guru or a trained chef, but from practical experience, I have to say that Filipino food is one of the best and diverse food that I have tried. It is a fusion of foreign and regional influences coupled with very innovative ingredients.

Junfer and I, like most Filipinos, would want to have our daily dose of Filipino food. However, when circumstances doesn’t permit that, we settle in on a once a week all Filipino feast. That is why, when I started to learn how to bake, one of the first things that I really tried to learn how to make was pandesal, you can’t get anymore Filipino than that! Through the months that I have been making pandesal, I kinda got the hung of doing it and my pandesal has improved immensely from the jaw-breaking, tooth-cracking, rock-like bread that I first made. So one week when the CFC Amsterdam had a Filipino mass/General Assembly, one of our friends suggested that I bring some pandesal for the mirienda that we normally have after the mass. I obliged and brought in like 50 pieces of bread. I was actually astonished at how quick the pandesal was gone from the table. I think all the bread was finished in a blink of an eye. While we were on our way out, some of our friends requested that I bring in more pandesal on our Family day that was to be held the following week. What was I to do?

I gave in to our friends’ request. So last Saturday morning, a couple of hours before the Family Day, I labored my way inside the kitchen, kneading and mixing and shaping and molding and proofing the little fluffy flour mixture, turning them into this moist, crisp-on-the-outside, chewy-on-the-inside, melt in your mouth pandesal. Boy, was my arm and back aching after I finished making them breads.




In total I brought in over 80 pieces of warm bread in the park where the event was taking place. I was again amazed by the speed all those breads were consumed. Quite a few people were actually asking if there were more, unfortunately, at the moment that was the maximum capacity my arms and back could produce at the moment. Haha. Maybe with more practice, next time I’ll be able to make more.