Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Baking with Breadfruit in Haiti


CTI volunteers Camille and Natalie George
CTI volunteer Natalie George is blogging from Haiti, where she’s joined her mother Dr. Camille George, CTI Board Member, Program Manager and Professor at the University of Saint Thomas. 

The George’s are in Haiti helping locals take advantage of an underutilized food source: Breadfruit. Breadfruit grows in abundance in Haiti, but spoils just days after ripening. CTI has developed a set of tools that villagers can use to preserve breadfruit as affordable flour.

Natalie and Camille are in Port-au-Prince, helping Haitians open a breadfruit bakery and showing “field to fork” proof that breadfruit can be harvested, transformed into flour, and processed into delicious and nutritious food products.

Baking sans Power 

What I take advantage of in my everyday life is the sheer luxury of electricity. It seems so normal to have a fridge that works all the time, and a light switch that turns on no matter what, however in Haiti things do not work the same way as they do in wealthier countries.

In Haiti, the government rations the use of electricity, and though every day varies, on average it will turn off around 9 AM and back on again around 7 PM. Some people have personal generators that they use to keep it on, and bigger companies, like our hotel, have some sort of deal with the government that allows them to use a small amount during the power outages. But overall, the average Haitian does not get any electric power within those hours.

So when we lost power the first day we began experimenting with recipe's in the bakery, we had to think on our feet. Not content to sit around twiddling my thumbs, I put on my leadership pants and rallied up the few of people left in the bakery (which quickly grew into a group spectacle) and we figured out how to get the propane working in the stove and oven, so we embarked our next quest.

Haitian Rum Cake

After some time of fiddling around with the propane stove, it was time to bake, and we decide on baking the Haitian cake, which includes rum and raisins. The recipe and baking turned out to be a GREAT success! They mini cakes were SUPER delicious and we all felt like we were some official top chef bakers (or maybe just me…). I didn’t want to stop there, especially since we had a few hours to kill AND a working stove. So, I decide that we should make another pizzelle batter and then try making cookies out of it.

Haitian Rum cake made
with breadfruit flour
With my new found baking confidence, I start mixing away and completely get ahead of myself and put in ¼ cup of salt instead of ¼ tsp of salt… needless to say the Haitian women helping me thought it was hilarious and they started scooping it out. Those magic makers were able to save the batter and we continued on our cookie quest. The cookies were too hot to taste right away, so we decided to let those cool while we made another batch of the Haitian rum cake.  This time, we added molasses to see if it would taste sweeter since the first batch some people commented that it still contained the “breadfruit taste” which is a strange bitterness. Again, a great success!

4 comments:

  1. I have had some of these products that Camille and the baker are making. They are very good. This is the ultimate green and sustainable way to feed people. I wish I could be there to be part of this exciting beguining. Congratulations to the entire team, Compatible Technology and the University of St. Thomas. One individual can make a difference and when we collaborate we can make a much bigger difference.
    Mary Mclaughlin
    Trees That Feed

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have had some of these products that Camille and the baker are making. They are very good. This is the ultimate Green and sustainable way to feed people. I wish I could be there to be part of this exciting beguining. Congratulations to the entire team, Compatible Technology and the University of St. Thomas. One individual can make a difference and when we collaborate we can make a much bigger difference.
    Mary Mclaughlin
    Trees That Feed

    ReplyDelete
  3. that's great keep up the good work

    ReplyDelete
  4. You want to try a solar oven. Seems like a cost effective method when power is so difficult to obtain.

    ReplyDelete