OVENS!

It was only a matter of time until I managed to turn my love of food into a Peace Corps project. As I think I’ve made pretty clear over these 2 years of blogging, food is a very important part of my life. Coming down to El Salvador, I was bombarded with a very different diet – tortillas, eggs, and beans, mainly, with lots of fried food & sugar to go with it. Over time, I’ve managed to adjust my eating around this different diet (and lose the 20 pounds I gained during my first 6 months in service) and find some Salvadoran foods that I am absolutely addicted to. Namely, corn products. This ranges from a hot, crisp tortillas straight off the comal to soft, salty-sweet tamales de maiz, to break-your-teeth crunchy totopostes out of the oven. Of utmost fascination to me has been pan dulce (sweet bread), which is not always made with corn, but is almost always delicious, especially when dipped in hot coffee. One of my missions in El Salvador has been learning to recreate some of these delicacies so that while I’m back in the states, well ensconced in an apartment complete with central air, wifi, and real furniture (read: couches instead of hammocks), I will be able to transport myself momentarily back to my hammock, where these days I pass many afternoons sipping coffee, dipping baked goods in said coffee, and listening to the torrential rain beat a tattoo on our tin roof.

Lucky me, Peace Corps was more than willing to aid & abet my cooking pursuits. One of the many objectives of PC volunteers down here is to introduce “environmentally friendly” ways of cooking. The vast majority of people down here cook with leña, or firewood. The stoves and ovens that they use with this leña are very inefficient and lead to the use of tons of wood to cook very little and also produce large amounts of smoke, which then remains in the structure or our lungs thanks to lack of chimneys or pipes. This also has helped El Salvador become the most deforested country in El Salvador, an astonishing fact when you consider the verdure I’m surrounded with at all times, but still a fact. To facilitate the PCV quest to reduce deforestation, protect Salvadorans from the black lung, and et cetera, Peace Corps has a strong relationship with 2 different NGOs that produce eco-efficient cook stoves and ovens. We volunteers can write grants for funds to help purchase these products for our communities, and also to pave the way for our various culinary pursuits.

new oven!

traditional oven

To obtain eco-efficient ovens, I wrote and was granted funds to purchase 2 wood-burning (but efficient!) ovens from Stoveteam International for my community: 1 for the school and 1 for the community center. Now, since these ovens are not replacing pre-existing, inefficient ovens, I have a hard time claiming that I am taking great steps to save the environment or protect my community members from the harms of cook-stove smoke. However, I am going to use these ovens for many purposes, one of which is educating people about the importance of looking for more environmentally friendly ways of cooking their food (another of which is turning my entire community into banana bread addicts).

While these new ovens of mine still burn leña, and are not gas or electric, they burn WAY less than the traditional adobe oven which Salvadoran women use to crank out their delicacies. With an adobe oven, it must be stuffed full of leña, which is then set on fire and allowed to burn for a few hours in the oven, after which the oven is swept clean and the food is placed in the same compartment. This oven of mine uses about 3-5 small pieces of wood, which go in a separate compartment from where the food is placed. The wood is ignited and burns for about a half hour to heat up the oven, after which the food can be put in the oven and firewood stays in the lower compartment to maintain the heat. All in all, a much cleaner, nicer process. Also, any smoke that this oven produces (which is negligible), goes out the stove through a chimney, so as to maintain our pristine pink lungs!

pan dulce in the adobe oven

pizza

experimenting with the new oven

ohhhh yeah

So far, there has been nothing but positive response from my community. This weekend we had the official “premier” of the oven, which included me making pizza and handing it out to anyone within arms reach and then a day-long “training” where we showed women how to turn on the oven and then made banana bread for any and all to try. Needless to say, my prowess is in high demand and I’m already booked as baking instructor for the next few weeks, hopefully with the payoff that some kind señora takes me under her wing and teaches me the ways of baking with ground corn in return.

first test run