Venezuelan bread made of corn

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In Venezuela, in addition to the well-known bread made with wheat flour, two other loaves are eaten, one made with a tuber called yucca and another made with corn called arepa. The last one, the arepa, par excellence, the popular bread of Venezuela is the one I want to present to you on this occasion. At present and for many years, arepa is prepared with processed and refined corn flour, but it is also manufactured in the traditional way inherited from our ancestors, which consists of boiling corn grains until they acquire enough softness to grind them.  In both cases, both with the refined corn flour and with the cooked and ground corn, a dough is made with which balls are made which are given circular and flat shapes manually to cook on the grill, a saucepan or a Clay dish specially made for this is called aripo, which is where the name arepa comes from. Currently a variation of the aripo is made with metal called budare. But they are also usually baked. I saw my grandmothers make arepas, I saw my mother make arepas, and I have also seen my wife make arepas, and I have made arepas many times, a hundred times I have made them. Almost every day I do arepa because I like to do them. The arepas that I show in my collage of photographs were made by me. The smiling woman they see there is my oldest daughter who has two packets of corn flour from the PAN brand. This is the most common and famous brand in the country, made by the international food company POLAR. Those packages were bought by my daughter in Chile five years ago when she visited her husband's family.  Do you know this Venezuelan bread? Have you ever eaten? Do you know what corn flour is? Have you seen packages of corn flour similar to those in the photo in the corridors of supermarkets in your country?