My First Official Christmas Ham Bread

The year: 2011

I just got back from living eight years in Caracas. Venezuela's capital.

I decided to go to culinary school, not to become a professional chef or anything like that, at least I wasn't thinking about that at the time, all I wanted was to improve my cooking skills, which weren't bad, but one always can be better.

I was excited, to say the least, although the experience was a bit disappointing at the end. However I learned a few things, I already talked about that in a previous article. One of those things was the Christmas Ham Bread.

No Venezuelan table is complete at Christmas without it. The smoked ham plus bacon of the filling, mixed with the flavors of raisins and green olives is just majestic, and it mixes well with the other dishes of our Traditional Christmas Dinner like Hallacas.

I remember the first one I made, it was a disaster!

I used whole olives, seeds, and all, instead of the pepper-filled ones the recipe really requires.

Also, I'm no fan of raisins and a huge fan of olives, so the bread had little raisins and too many olives!

You couldn't cut that bread, the knife always stumbled with an olive seed bone and it was awful. My dad mocked me every year remembering that episode, and I almost gave up trying to do it again, until I got in culinary school.

The dough

Now, the teacher that showed us how to make this dough was old, not too old but over retirement. She told us a few secrets for her dough:

1.- Water not milk: She said something about the chemistry of milk and its interaction with the yeast and the fat of the filling, and for a smooth and elastic, and moist dough it was better to use water than milk. I didn't understand her explanation but, ok.

2.- Love it with butter: from a kilo of flour, you have to take out 3 portions of dough to make 3 loaves of bread. After kneading them for 15 minutes each, you have to massage them with lots of butter, stretch it with butter, fold it with butter, love it with butter. The result is a very silky dough.

3.- No flour volcano: you always see on google or youtube that you first mix the liquids and then for a flour volcano in the table, then pour the liquids. This one is not like that. You have to use a big big bowl to mix the liquids, water, yeast, sugar, egg, and melted butter, then the flour all at once. A bit messy but, ok.

I like this recipe, the result is a very smooth dough, moist, it doesn't dry out at all, and the crispy bits are the best, the butter and the fat from the bacon do that and it's heaven.

The Filling

The teacher didn't explain anything about this except the distribution of the olives. She said that to ensure that every piece gets an olive, you have to place them in a road length-wise before rolling it. As for the ham and bacon, the sky is the limit, you can put as much as you want or can afford.

After that class, I planned to do it at home, so, I waited for my paycheck and bought all the ingredients I needed. That time I couldn't afford much, and it was my first time making them so, I played it safe. I didn't have a baking tray either so I had to use a square cake baking tray and the stuck together, that was a shame.

The taste however was G O O D! And we had three!

Of course, they didn't last long, between my parents advertising them proudly by sharing with the neighbors and us picking them sliver by sliver the next day they were gone. By 2012 I even sold some here in my town and one of my Oboe teachers came from Caracas to get 3 for their Christmas Dinner, that was awesome.

It's been 3 years since the last time I made that bread, the materials are too expensive for us to afford, although, I have high hopes for this year, and I believe that I will be able to make delicious bread this year.

So, what do you think?. Do you think this year I will make them again?

Hopefully I will, I need new pictures 😂 😂

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This is 100% Original Content.

The pictures are all mine (old ones, from 2011) except the lead image, that's from Flikr.

See you next time!

✨✨Blessings✨✨

@rebeysa85

December 7th, 2021.