Arepas and patacones

By Brae:

A while ago, my Grampa asked me to tell him exactly what arepas and patacones were. At first, we thought all arepas were deep fried with different things inside because this is what we ate all the time on the coast. A few times a week we got arepas for breakfast from a place on the street near our house. We saw the lady shaping the dough into circles and then a man fried it until it puffed up, and then another lady made a hole in it and put the egg or meat inside.

But when we travelled around Colombia, we learnt that asking what arepas were like was a bit like asking what is bread like? I mean by this that you can get brown bread, white bread, bread in sticks or rolls or loaves, bread with olives in, or raisin bread or even chocolate bread! So bread can come in all different shapes and flavours and so can arepas. Each region of Colombia has its own speciality for arepas and we tried a lot of them when we travelled around. Our favourite kinds were fried with meat, filled with egg and sweet aniseed ones. We also liked cheese ones.

Even though we ate arepas all the time, we didn’t know how to make them until we went to live with Diana for a week and she showed us. This is a video to show my Grampa but we thought you’d all like to see it (you can also hear me speaking a bit of Spanish in the middle bit).

Patacones are pretty much always the same, but we still didn’t know how to make them, but we do now. They are pretty easy.

One thought on “Arepas and patacones”

  1. Briliant – I now understand what they are! My favourite was with egg inside. Now I know how to make them maybe we’ll try to make some here for breakfast….

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