Archives

Grain drying. Armintza, Lemoiz (Bizkaia), 2019. Enrike Gaubeka. Labayru Fundazioa Photographic Archive.

This is a follow-up of a previous post, published on 26 April 2019, dedicated to the cultivation and harvesting of maize.

Freshly-harvested, tender maize ears were roasted in the traditional wood-burning oven used for baking bread. Flour from oven-roasted maize grain (labartoa) is ideal for making flatbreads (taloak), typically soaked in milk or accompanied with pan-fried pork products (sartenekoa) such as chorizo and other fatty meat cuts. Maize flatbreads used to be toasted on a griddled placed over the glowing coals of the hearth (behesua) in the very old days, and on the kitchen stove (txapea) more recently. (more…)