Cake and Commerce

Buying Machetes in San Salvador

Ethan bargains with a street vendor for his & hers machetes. Ah, sweet sweet romance.

For $10, a family can enjoy a large meal in the park

At a small park northwest of San Salvador in a village known for its shamans.

Cafe Ataco - Processor of green coffee Beans in El Salvador

Cafe Ataco is a pretty typical wet processor of green beans. Privately owned, Ataco processes coffee cherries into dried green coffee beans for many local Fincas, where the coffee is actually grown and picked.

Here are what coffee cherries look like (there are two 'beans' per cherry in this variety of arabica)

We visited at the end of the season, so there was only a small amount of processing going on. Mostly drying. The trucks dropping off their loads of cherries were long gone.

So use your imagination. I'm not going to describe the process (mainly because I can't remember all of the steps and which photo goes with which step and it is done so very well here.) but rather I'm just going to share some photos from our visit. In the next entry down, I include photos of all the equipment - antique, worn, and rather typical, as one of my colleagues explained.

Once the truck carrying in the cherries has been weighed, the cherries are dropped into a bin and flushed with water - water that carries them through the process of pulping (removing the cherry pulp). The bins are made of concrete. Each bin has a number, so the beans from each finca can be kept separate throughout the process. Ataco processes both organic and conventionally farmed beans.

Here the pulped beans are set out to dry for a few weeks. Rain would damage the drying beans, so this is done during the dry season.

The dark spots are from beans that were not fully pulped. These will be sorted and discarded.

Every drying lot has a sign beside it to show where it is from, lot number, quality:

After a little more drying and sorting, the beans end up on a long conveyor belt. Women sort out the 'bad' beans - quakers, broken beans, etc. According to Ataca, different countries (and buyers) have different standards for defects. One Italian company apparently accepts up to 6% defective beans. An American company only accepts 1%. When they sort the beans, they keep this in mind.

The beans are then bagged and put into storage. Buyers will sample from the sacks. And decide whether or not to purchase the lot.

After our tour of the facility, we are served coffee roasted at Ataco. It is brewed in the traditional way:

It is the first truly delicious cup of coffee I have during my visit. Apparently the best beans are exported. Most of the stuff consumed in El Salvador is what the Europeans and Americans don't want.

We then go to see ponies that are kept on the property. One of them bites me. Stay away from the one on the left! Blood pony!

Antique Coffee processing equipment at Cafe Ataco in El Salvador

More pictures from Cafe Ataco, high in the hills northwest of San Salvador. Their claim to fame? Starbucks buys green beans from them.

Many layers of paint coat this piece.

A wood-fired drying kiln

Gears:

I'm not sure what this one does.

Made in New York and Illinois

This batch roaster does 250 lbs at a time:

A "Granulizer" for grinding coffee. Bad picture, but interesting piece of equipment:

What I learned about raw cashews in El Salvador

Never ever ever eat them. Or open them.

Let me back up for a moment. I don't mean cashews that are sold in the store as "raw" -- those are fine. In actuality, they are not raw, they are heated to break down the toxins in the nut, in the skin - how anyone ever figured out the nuts are edible once treated is beyond me. Did I just say toxins? Oh yes, toxins, specifically toxic oil. Called Cardol oil. Which is an urushiol, a catch-all for oils derived from members of the Family Anacardiaceae, the most famous members being poison ivy, poison oak, and poison sumac. Less famous urushiols include mango skin and cashews. That's right, cashews.

Maranon, the fruit of the cashew (check out my link above or the photo below to see what it looks like) is extremely tannic except for its 24 hours of ripeness, during which it must be eaten (or used for confections, ice creams, sorbets, etc) or it starts to ferment. Which may not be a bad thing. Raw, it simply tastes tannic.

But the nut is an entirely different story. Ethan was served a drink presumably made with some maranon juice, and garnished with a maranon (sorry this is out of focus, it was dark and I was a little out of sorts). The cashew is the green thing on top. Or rather, that's the cashew pod:

So now you know what the fruit and nut look like. Ethan decided he would try to open it. When he couldn't (he attempted the job with his teeth) I thought I'd flex my jaw muscles and open it up myself. Which I did:

Now looking at this photo I realize I can see the glistening oil just under the skin that caused my mouth to almost immediately burst into a painful sensation I can only describe as what eating battery acid must be like.  Dinner, which arrived shortly after that, was painful for both of us - we both succeeded in getting oil on ourselves. In our mouths. Ethan deadened his pain with alcohol. I chose to freeze mine out with a non-alcoholic watermelon freeze. I could barely taste my food for the rest of the night. But I think nothing of it as soon as the sensation goes away, 16 hours later.

Flash forward two days later. I'm back in the US, sitting at home, when I notice that something is amiss on my face. All around my mouth I've broken out. I look in the mirror. My entire face is broken out in something that looks like a cross between poison ivy and excema. The next day I google cashews. I freak out. My face! My precious face!

After failing to get an appointment with my dermatologist, I called my internist. Or rather I spoke with my internist's nurse. Who took detailed notes and, after speaking with my doctor, recommended that I not come in unless it got worse. In the meantime? Hydrocortisone 1%, benadryl, and no touching!

I'll never ever ever do that again. No cashews!

Comunidad Benedicion de Dios, San Salvador

On our second day in El Salvador, our co-host (and El Mundo and Miami Herald stringer photographer) Ethan James took us to a squatter community called Comunidad Benedicion de Dios. The settlement began in December of '07 and according to Ethan it has grown dramatically every time he's gone back to see it. The squatters chose an unoccupied but privately owned parcel of land for their settlement. And that's not sitting well with the local government.

A sign, spray painted on to a bed sheet, welcomes you to the community:

Apparently the city government will not provide services to the residents of the community as it would signal that they approve of the illegal 'seizure' of the land. As a result, there is no water, no sewage - there are no services of any kind. Ethan asked a resident how she gets water. "A water truck comes and sells us water," she said.

The residents of the community didn't used to be homeless. A succession of natural disasters - earthquakes and high-power, destructive winds - destroyed the homes of many. Since the government did not provide shelter or aid, many found themselves squatting, here, in the shadows of large homes and volcanic hills.

The homes are simple. Bamboo or wood branches act as supports for cardboard boxes, plastic tarps, old vinyl billboards and what little corrugated tin residents can scare up. The lodgings are primitive at best, with dirt floors, no plumbing, and kitchens that are little more than a grill placed over a fire:

Most of the structures look like they could be easily blown down by the big bad wolf. This one has street names on it, so people can find their way around the community.

This one, perched atop a small hill, is made from old billboards, TV boxes, and bamboo:

This one has a slanted roof and a tarp secured on the roof for some rain protection. Right now is the dry season, so residents don't have to worry about rain. Come May, the rains come at night, likely destroying much of the structural integrity of the homes.

In front of the community's "store", a little boy helps his grandmother find choice branches. The bamboo is long gone.

This house even has an address:

This house uses the side of a hill for its fourth wall:

All of the cardboard comes from grocery stores - grocery stores selling products that residents can likely not afford.

The community does have a president, who is their de facto spokesman. Ethan took his picture and told him he would come back in a few days to interview him. I'm sure Ethan took some incredible photos - if I can find his work, I'll link it here.

The president is the man with the spray-painted dot on his hat:

While we were there, the ice cream man came by with his cart. As we walked by he was thronged by young girls, clamoring for an icy treat. They laughed at us as we walked down the 'street' and giggled as they ran by us later.

For other minor necessities, there is a small store in the community. This one sells bread - both the sweet and not-sweet versions.

We left in a hurry after we noticed a man eying us from a hilltop. As we walked toward our car, Ethan noticed a photographer from another paper, coming in with his camera to take shots of the community. Scooped - by just a few days. I left feeling terrible. These people were desperately poor and had no resources to provide the most basic of basic necessities for themselves - shelter. And here we were, rich Americans (relatively), taking pictures of their homes - in my case for my blog - and then going back to our lush compound where we had everything. The poverty is staggering.

Solace at the main cathedral in San Salvador

The coconut sorbetto vendor, San Salvador

It was a hot afternoon and Ethan spotted the vendor selling coconut sorbetto, a dairy free coconut treat made with coconut milk. Two scoops, raspberry honey, in a small hand-made red cone. Heaven.

The Beach at Sunset, El Salvador

If I didn't include this, I'd have my tourist card revoked.

Making Pupusas in El Salvador with Marielena

Marielena, who works for Bess and Ethan, showed us how to make pupusas our second morning in El Salvador. Pupusas are one of my favorite uses of masa - basically they're extremely thick tortillas filled with a combination of cheese, meat and/or vegetables. The standard 'classic' filling is chicharron paste, made from pork and spices. They sell it pre-made, in chubs, at the supermarket:

Another key ingredient is cheese. The standard Salvadoran pupusa cheese is a fresh cheese called quesillo that has a texture somewhat similar to ricotta. It is sold in blocks or as pieces at the lacteos shops:

The last ingredient is beans. A black bean and cheese combination is available almost everywhere pupusas are sold. Marielena prepared the beans ahead of time (see above) and had them ready to be added. The black beans are pureed and thinned with water to the desired consistency. For the pupusas they are thick. For breakfast we had black beans that were almost as thin as gravy.

Marielena prepared the masa (to a much softer consistency than tortillas) ahead of time and kept a bowl of cold water out to make handing the pupusas easier.

She grabbed a small handful of the masa. Working quickly, she formed a thick 3-4" diameter cake with her hands and then filled it first with cheese, then beans:

She then folds over the pancake to form a semi-circle and pinches the ends together, using water as 'glue'. She fills in gaps with extra masa:

She then begins the process of carefully, slowly, forming the filled masa cake into a flat pancake. The seam is at the top as she presses down:

Once the pupusa is the right size, she places it on an oiled griddle to cook:

The cheese bubbles out, the tops get brown and crisp. Jenny and I both take turns making pupusas:

We fill the entire griddle up with bean and cheese pupusas:

The perfect pupusa:

I take an 'arty' food shot, just to show the thickness (yeah, right). Usually pupusas are served with a mild Salvadoran sauerkraut, which we didn't have at home. I made do with Marie Sharp's habanero sauce from Belize:

So good.