Making BALEADAS with the Garcia Family

Baleada's are SO GOOD! My favorite.

Baleadas are one of Honuras' most characteristic and famous foods.  A baleada is a wheat flour tortilla, generally quite thick, filled with mashed fried beans and folded in half.  This simple flour tortilla can also be filled with a wide variety of other ingredients.  The final result is a tortilla filled with food, and often sold on the street that is easily held in the hand and eaten on the go. 

I have video of us making them. It is just that the computers in this ciber aren't fast enough to load them.  We may have to wait until I get home.

Ready to learn!

This is Elder Owen with Karín (not Karen, it's a sharp i sound)
Karín is funny and really crazy.  He doesn't do a good job controlling his voice level, so he ends up shouting when he gets excited.

The beans! They come from the farms out here.  They buy them in bags and use them to cook. For Baleada's they just throw them in a blender. Pure bean baby!

You can find more info about BALEADA's on the internet. Hondurans make them all different kinds of ways.  

http://greathonduranfood.com/honduran-food/honduran-baleada/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baleada

http://holahonduras.net/food/baleadas/

The Origin of the Baleada

There are many stories and urban legends that explain the origin of the name of this dish. One story comes from La Ceiba. In 1964 when Teresa, 20 years old woman was abandoned by her husband and decided to take a loan to start up her business of selling tortillas to keep their five children. The business was located near the railway line where the train went to employees of Standard Fruit Company, which quickly became customers. The dish soon became the favorite of the company workers, passersby and people working nearby but it had no name. Once a customer who was eating made a funny comment “beans are bullets, cheese is gunpowder and the tortilla is the gun” and since then everyone called them ballads.

Another of these tells the story of a woman from San Pedro Sula who sold wrapped tortillas. She was well known for her delicious cuisine. One fine day she was fired upon with several bullets (balas in Spanish). Some say she died of her injuries, other say that it was not serious because she recovered soon and returned to selling tortillas. Since then the workers began to say “I’m going to the baleada” (“the shot woman”).

Others say the name originated because when people were biting tortillas the bite pressure made the whole beans “fire” by the sides of the tortilla, many said that they seemed to be bullets. And this fact all began to call the new dish “Baleada”.