When I first came across arepas, at a food market in Williamsburg, New York, almost a decade ago, I was attracted mainly by the fact that these stuffed South American corn breads were, as the stall proclaimed in big letters: “110% gluten-free!” which meant I could share one with a coeliac friend. One bite later, I regretted my generosity: crunchy, buttery and filled with sweetcorn and salty, stringy cheese, I could easily have polished off the whole thing without any help.
These, I later learned, were Colombian arepas de choclo, but arepas – flat, unleavened maize patties that pre-date European settlement – are found in many forms and flavours in many other countries, too, most notably Venezuela, but also Bolivia, Ecuador and parts of Central America. As J Kenji López-Alt notes on Serious Eats, to think of arepas like thick tortillas “is the equivalent of a Colombian native hearing about bread and saying: ‘Oh, it’s that European wheat cake, right?’” Within the first three days of his first visit to the country, he says he sampled more than a dozen different variations: “Arepas stuffed with cheese and baked on hot stones in coal-fired ovens. Arepas with sour milk cheese worked right into the dough. Arepas de choclo, made like a pancake with sweetcorn on a hot griddle. Arepas de huevo, golden yellow deep-fried puffy arepas split open and stuffed with an egg. Tiny arepitas eaten as a snack. Even packs of arepa-flavoured corn chips.”
