Hello my steemit friends! Today I will teach you the process to prepare dough for arepas but from trite corn. Sometimes we must look for other methods to make some delicious arepas, which are practically obligatory in every table of a Venezuelan home.
First of all I must emphasize that this recipe was made with trite corn, that is, corn without shell. I bought this during my visit to the town "El Diamante" in the state of Yaracuy, Venezuela. You can read my post about my visit to that town by clicking here.
The first thing we must do is wash the corn with clean water of course, in this way we eliminate any dirt or something else unwanted. Once we have washed it well, we strain the corn to remove the dirty water.
Once again we add clean water until it completely covers the corn grains and then we take them to the kitchen to cook, this step is important since it’s the one who will be softening the corn; Something we must be very aware of is the amount of water in the pot as time goes by, because the water will evaporate and the idea is that the corn is completely covered and can soften properly; we must also check very often if the corn is already soft enough.
Once it is at the point we want, we remove completely the water with which we were boiling, and let the corn stand until it cools down to continue with the process.
After the corn is completely cool down, we can begin the process to make it a homogenous dough and make our arepas. For this step we will need the help of a mill but in the case of not having one on hand we can replace it with a blender or processor.
We are processing the corn through the mill and once we have all our ground corn we can see our dough but it is still a bit scattered so we need it even more homogeneous.
So to achieve that texture we must add a little water and knead with our hands. We have to be careful with the amount of water we use, so I recommend adding small amounts, because if we use too much we can make the dough very watery and lose the texture of a homogenous dough that is what we are looking for, that is soft but consistent at the same time.
When we have our dough in the desired consistency, we can begin to make small dough balls, we must smash the dough to make them flat (not completely because we are going to fill them but in the case that we want them as a companion we can make them thinner) and give them a round shapes so it looks like a circle as perfect as possible, it doesn’t have to be exactly that way but arepas usually take that form, although it’s not bad to be creative.
Then, we need to use some butter and heat our “budare”, frying pan or griddle to cook our arepas, we need to do this, in this way the arepas do not stick to the surface and we can turn them around without any problem. We must pay attention to the arepas, since it does not take them long to be ready, so we must turn them over so both sides are perfectly cooked.
Finally, we just have to open our arepas and fill them with whatever we want (in a next post I will show you how I make each of the fillings of my arepas in these photos). In my case, I fill them with meat and “perico” (made with egg).
My family loves these arepas and the dough has a texture and taste exactly like the pre-cooked corn flour we buy in supermarkets!
Hope you like my post and it helps some of you on how to make arepas! Greetings.
