GREVIC ALVARADO
If you are looking for something different to try for the holiday cooking, perhaps you may want to add hallaca to the menu. While hallaca is similar to the seasonal favourite, pastelle, it is different, and is described as a complete meal.
The Venezuelan hallaca is a special traditional dish prepared during the month of December to celebrate the Christmas festivities with the family.
It stands as the main dish on the table, always accompanied by ham bread, chicken salad and roast pork.
Hallaca is similar to pastelle but it's prepared differently.
Here in Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuelans Joanesa Cedeño and her children Izaura Gomez and Jhonwilmer Gomez specialise in preparing their country's hallacas. They have opened their own food business, Dulce & Salado, and hallaca is one of their main offerings.
[caption id="attachment_1051176" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Joanesa Cedeno said all this takes two days of preparation, organisation to go on sale to different clients - Grevic Alvarado[/caption]
Cedeño explains: “The Venezuelan hallaca is a complete meal with a unique and unmistakable smell, made from ground corn, stuffed with meat and pork in stew, decorated with chicken or hen, olive, raisins, capers, egg, onion, potato, carrot and of course spices and a touch of special love, and after assembling it, giving it a peculiar square shape and wrapping it in a banana leaf and wick thread."
The most fun and dynamic way to prepare the hallacas is to use a large table and place the ingredients in an assembly line. Cedeño says hallacas can take up to two days to prepare, depending on the quantity you want to make.
Both in Venezuela and in TT getting the ingredients to make the hallacas is complex.
[caption id="attachment_1051174" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Joanesa Cedeno and her daughter Izaura Gomez assemble an oriental Venezuelan hallaca for sale during Christmas celebrations. - Grevic Alvarado[/caption]
“We find many of the ingredients in different local businesses, but we implement cost strategies and some we bring through parcels from Venezuela.
“The hallaca is a 'poem' wrapped in banana leaves and Venezuelans make comparisons about which are the tastiest.”
She explains that Andean hallacas are prepared only with pork and chicken, strained corn dough and chickpeas. It is customary in some homes to leave the capers macerating in red wine, after being washed with water.
The oriental hallacas include three meats: beef, pork and poultry. Others have seafood (mussels,
pepitonas, chipichipis, dogfish, chucho or skate).
[caption id="attachment_1051175" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Joanesa Cedeno said: “The hallaca is a poem wrapped in banana leaves and Venezuelans make comparisons about which are the tastiest.” - Grevic Alvarado[/caption]
Hallacas from Caracas are a little sweet. They contain beef, pork and chicken, as well as bacon and tomatoes. Their dough is a little firmer than those in the rest of the country and may contain nuts such as almonds.
In Ang
