PASADENA, CA– It’s truly amazing to see how bread is an intrinsic part of the human experience. Whether you are sitting with a friend by the large storefront window of a cozy coffee shop in Dublin, Ireland, or your travels take you to a neighborhood bakery located in the heart of the former Mayan empire, Guatemala, chances are you could actually enjoy a familiar dining experience while breaking bread with someone you hold dear.
“Un pan de soda, por favor,” asks our Director of Product Development and Technical Services, Alex Peña, at a bakery in Zona Cuatro in Guatemala City. It was a late and humid afternoon when Peña visited this particular shop with his best friend from his days in the United States Marine Corps, and it was time to eat. When he’s handed his order, Peña notes that the texture, the crust, and the crumb structure are very similar to Irish Soda Bread (perhaps the result of their stone wood-fired ovens). The mañas – or the unique processes based on experience used by certain bakers – vary from one bakery to another, and as he put it, “They control temperature by not really controlling a gauge, but by ‘experience’.” It is a seemingly instinctual process where ‘feel’ supersedes technology and empirical measurements. Peña and his friend strike up a conversation with the baker, and are invited to observe his team prepare the next day’s breads and learn the recipes. The result was as human as it gets: beautiful bread and a fulfilling sense of camaraderie. At one point during that busy evening filled with kneading, reading, and eating, pan de soda catches his eye again, and takes Peña back to a city with a vibrant Irish community: Chicago.
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