Nicaragua: Throw it in a fire

"Have you ever baked bread before?" my host mother asked me. "We're going to bake bread today at grandma's house."

Sounds like fun, I thought. But how are we going to bake bread without an oven? 

As we arrived to grandma's house that afternoon, a couple of the aunts were already in the kitchen mixing up the dough. Good thing the family is strong in numbers because ten pounds of flour made quite a bit of dough. They taught me how to make the traditional Nicaraguan "pico" by flattening out a ball of dough into a circle, adding a mixture of salty cheese (cuajada) and sugar to the middle, and folding up the sides so that it formed a triangle. I taught them how to make pretzels.

Once the yeast had activated and the dough had been formed, the bread was declared ready to enter the "oven." And this, my friends, is how we made an oven:

We heated up a large iron pot from the bottom and the top, using wood to heat the bottom and creating a cover of zinc topped with flaming coconut shells and wood to heat the top. It worked pretty well, and even though it didn't take long for each individual batch of bread to bake, we were there for hours due to the quantity of dough we prepared. 

Fresh out of the "oven"

Not everybody bakes this way in Nicaragua. Some people have artisan ovens which use wood and others use gas ovens (though they are a bit spendy to use, hence nobody really uses them for much besides storage). I proposed to my family that we build an artisan oven at grandma's house to make this bread-baking process a little bit easier, and perhaps even bake enough to sell it on a regular basis. They are on board with the project, so I suppose that means it is time to create an action plan and put that plan into action.