A Small Bakery, Philippine Style

I mentioned, in a previous post, about a delicious bread they call coco bread. It is made in small, mom-and- pop bakeries just about everywhere in the area. The coco bread has a fresh, coconut filling in the middle of a delicious roll.

Kneeding the dough between rollers

Well, here are some pictures of a bakery just about a kilometer from our house. The bakery takes up most of the small home of the couple who own it. The two are hard working: they both bake and take turns driving their tricycle-taxi, like the one Emelie and I use to transport ourselves and family around town, only they use theirs, picking up passengers for 7 peso a ride, to add income to the small profit they make from the bakery.*

Their cocobread is the best I've eaten from the several bakeries in the area that make the same bread.

Baking pans with rolls waiting to go into the oven

From Scratch:
The bread dough is mixed then put through rollers to kneed, then laid on a large table where the baker pulls off just the right size chunks of dough and places them on baking pans. His practiced hands move very quickly. No measuring is done but all his rolls are exactly the same size and shaped perfectly into the several kinds of rolls he is making.

Two oil drums made into an oven

When the oven is hot and the rolls are ready, the pans are put into the oven, which is made of two, fifty-five gallon drums laid down,placed side by side and surrounded by concrete blocks cemented together for support and insulation.Dried sticks of wood are fed into the cavity under the ovens, on ther right-hand side. After 30 years of baking bread, the baker knows just how much wood to use to get the oven to operating temperature. No thermometer is used, either. The temperature is adjusted only by how much wood he feeds into the oven's bottom. And he pulls the bread from the oven whenever he thinks it is time, without using a  timer.

Halfway through the baking process, the rolls are removed and the pans are turned around 180 degrees, for even baking, because the ovens do not heat evenly throughout. The red dot in the center of each roll distinguishes the coco bread from other filled rolls of the same shape. These are starting to look pretty darn good!

The finished product : Coco bread!

Well, here is the fresh-baked coco bread, hot and delicious. Just wonderful with a cup of coffee or hot chocolate. Three is my minimum and maximum. Never less, never more.

Hats off to the Filipinos who are small business owners, like the man and woman who own this bakery. Their profit margin is slim, yet they work all day long, seven days a week to support their families.

*At the request of the owners, I have not mentioned their names.