Crusty Bread from Around the World
CHILE
WHO: Pilar Hernandez is a Chilean writer and baker who documents her baking adventures on her blog, Pilar’s Chilean Food & Garden. Pilar recently released her cookbook, The Chilean Kitchen (Skyhorse, 2020), which features many of her traditional Chilean recipes, from alfajores to empanadas.
WHAT: Marraqueta, a crusty fermented dough shaped and baked into a four-roll loaf
WHEN: Late 19th century
WHERE: Chile
A BREAD OF MANY NAMES
Marraqueta is the most-consumed, well-known, and beloved bread in Chile. I can’t even remember my first taste of marraqueta—it has always been in my life. Marraqueta is very similar to the baguette. We haven’t had a lot of immigrants from France in Chile, but we think that either an English or German immigrant familiar with the baguette may have brought the original recipe. The marraqueta has many names, too. In Santiago, the capital, it has always been marraqueta. I grew up south of the capital and knew marraqueta as pan francés—French bread. In Valparaiso, they call it pan batido—whipped bread.
NATIONAL TREASURE
What we love about the marraqueta is its shape, which makes it the main structural support to all of our sandwiches. In Chile, we are all about the sandwich, particularly the choripán. You split the marraqueta and remove the doughy center—what we call the miga—and you stuff it with chorizo and a salsa, pebre. We open most barbecues with the . Barbecues in general don’t exist without the crunchy marraqueta. We also love the marraqueta for its simplicity. Four ingredients—flour, water, salt, yeast—nothing more. Add fat, and that is not marraqueta.
