Honduran Baleadas

In the first few days of 2023, as I was trying to solidify the (still fluid, ever changing) List for Phase 3 of the Tribunal, I came across an article published on The Onion- and The AV Club-adjacent foodie website The Takeout (where, full disclosure, I have also published a freelance article or two). It was called The Best Street Food in Honduras Began With Dock Workers and from the title alone it immediately had my attention. Street food with a story is essentially our favorite subject at the Tribunal, and if it doesn’t necessarily come wrapped in bread, well, sometimes we’ll stretch our definitions a bit.

There was no need to redefine anything in this case–our mission has already taken us through tacoes and various types of wraps, and I personally find a flatbread wrapped around something delicious to be sandwich-adjacent, at least enough that I’m happy to write about it. The Baleada looked simple enough, yet intriguing–a warm flour tortilla filled with refried beans, cheese, and crema, with optional embellishments like chorizo or other meats, eggs, avocados, pickled onions. There was something intriguing about it though, whether its humble origin among La Ceiba dockworkers, the apocryphal story of its inventor being shot by bank robbers but surviving to continue selling food the next day (supposedly providing its name “la baleada”–the shot woman). Most likely it was simply the obvious fondness that article’s author felt for this comforting street food, and wanting to experience that same feeling myself.

So I found myself earlier this month at Esquina Del Sabor Catracho in Belmont Cragin, one of only a few Honduran restaurants in Chicago–I found a handful clustered in this area of the Northwest side that served baleadas. The menu contains some familiar references–tacos dorados, carne asada, pastelitos–but enough unique and interesting items that I hope to return soon and explore more Honduran cuisine. For this visit, I was only interested in Baleadas, or “Baliadas” as the item appeared on their menu.

Where on this menu the Spanish language version says “mantequilla” and the English translation renders that as “butter,” it is instead referencing crema or sour cream, which is called Mantequilla in the Honduran dialect of Spanish. I ordered a “Baliada Regular,” the simplest preparation with beans, cheese, and crema, and “Baliada con todo,” the most complicated, which contained beans, crema, cheese, avocado, scrambled eggs, and chunks of grilled steak much like those found in a carne asada taco.

The baleadas arrived on a single plate, each consisting of a single large flour tortilla folded over its fillings. These tortillas clearly did not come out of a package–they were thick, pliable, chewy, clearly handmade, still hot from the griddle when they were filled and put in front of me.

The Baliada Regular was spread down the center with a broad stripe of reddish refried beans–rather than pintos, Honduran frijoles are made with small red beans that are sometimes simply called “Honduran red beans”–a thick bead of Honduran crema, more assertively flavored than American sour cream, possibly seasoned with lime juice and salt; and a generous dusting of a dry crumbly cheese very much like Mexican queso cotija. It may in fact have been queso cotija, though descriptions of the dish cite a Honduran cheese called queso duro instead.

With a drizzle of the provided hot sauce–each table had a large bottle of Jutiquile Sabor Olanchano, a Honduran brand of hot sauce, sitting at the center next to the napkins like the ketchup in an American diner–this was as good and as simple a breakfast as I could imagine. The beans, the crema, and the cheese, that combination of savory, sour, and salty alone was an ideal bite, though enhanced by the sour and spicy boost of the hot sauce. But the beans were not the featured player in this dish, nor were any of its accompaniments–the tortilla was.

I finished that entire baleada before I turned my attention to the second, the baleada con todo or “with everything.”

The bits of steak were great, with that same browned surface and chewy texture that you get with carne asada. The eggs were good. The avocado was a little sparse but welcome. I got about halfway through this and had to give up simply because it was so much food. But at its core, that combination of beans, crema, and cotija was still present, and that tortilla–cooled a bit from when it first hit the table, but still warm and soft and good–was still the most notable thing about the… sandwich? wrap? taco?

I tend to differentiate between two main types of sandwiches, the kind where there is some featured ingredient that is being enclosed in bread. With these types of sandwiches–and they are the kind of thing the Earl of Sandwich would recognize as such, unlike much of what we cover here–the bread is almost immaterial. Sometimes a good quality bread can even detract from such a sandwich, since it draws focus away from that featured main ingredient. Pulled pork is an example I often cite–it needs a squishy white hamburger bun because the focus should be on the pork primarily, with the sauce and accoutrements like coleslaw secondarily. The bread is merely there as a handle.

The second type of sandwich–and lest you think I’m setting this up as a strict dichotomy there is a wide range of gradients inbetween! I’m talking about a spectrum and not a binary–that second type of sandwich is the opposite, wherein a particularly good piece of bread has some interesting ingredients added to it to create something new. The bread may or may not be the focus, but it will at least be notable in the final result. Jambon beurre is a good example of this type–what I call “bread, adorned.” Ham and butter may be the only named ingredients, and both may be of good or even great quality, but without an excellent baguette this sandwich can only be disappointing.

A good baleada is the latter type. Baleadas are good bread, adorned with beans and cheese and crema, and I encourage anyone who likes a good flatbread to try one if you can. I wanted another almost immediately, but with limited ability to drive to the northwest side to get one, I had to try making it myself.

I used Honduran red beans in my frijoles, but they did not turn out as deeply chestnut in color as Esquina del Sabor Catracho’s had been. Perhaps I should have reused the soaking liquid–which had turned a bright red in color after 16 hours in contact with the beans reddish skin–as a cooking medium instead of the chicken stock I did use. I suppose I also could have caramelized the onions that went into this a bit more thoroughly. Their flavor was excellent though, very much informed by the browned onions and garlic and chicken stock without overwhelming the bean flavor.

Making the tortillas was more difficult. The tortilla dough is a chemically leavened, high-hydration dough that is almost unworkably sticky even after a 45 minute rest. But after a few tries, I managed to find a rhythm, shaping and stretching them initially with my hands before finishing them on a tortilla press. These cooked on a cast iron griddle for 2 minutes on the first side and 1 minute after the flip and they were great.

They did not, Mindy will confirm, hold a candle to the fresh tortillas that I’d received at Esquina Del Sabor Catracho. She’s not wrong. Those tortillas were excellent, life-changing. Mine were merely good, and quickly became less good as they cooled. But they scratched the itch. I immediately made myself a baleada with my homemade frijoles, some homemade crema, cotija cheese, and hot sauce–I used Valentina, as I was unable to source the Honduran brand and this Mexican hot sauce is very tasty.

But these were smaller tortillas, smaller baleadas, and I had plenty of them, enough to make my own baleada con todo. I started with beans and cotija as before, then added seasoned ground beef, scrambled eggs, slices of avoaco, plenty of crema, and lashings of Valentina hot sauce.

This was a spectacular lunch. Between the beans and cheese, the crema and the Valentina, I’ve added what essentially amounts to multiple layers of fat. There’s the meat, savory, fatty ground beef seasoned with onion and garlic, paprika and lemon and tomato and beef soup base. Is it authentic? I don’t know! I had it leftover from making the Columbian arepas con huevo and thought it would work here. Then there’s the egg, seasoned and scrambled in plenty of butter until set just a bit more than you might want to plate it individually, but just the right amount when putting it into a sandwich or taco. Finally the avocado, ripe to the point where it’s difficult to handle without indenting it yet not quite to the point of turning brown. Meaty, rich and creamy added to earthy, salty, sour, and piquant, enclosed in a pliant, chewy shell. What’s not to like?

Yet I can’t help but think that 9 time out of 10, I’d choose this instead.

Perhaps when it comes to Honduran cuisine, nothing will ever beat the simplicity of the minimalist baleada regular for me, but I look forward to putting that to the test over the next weeks and months. However, this will likely be the last you hear from me on the topic. February is a short month, and I wasn’t sure I was going to finish all my promised writeups by month’s end, but here we are. March is coming in like wet and windy lion and I’ll soon have 3 new sandwiches to write about. I hope you’ll come along for the ride. Thanks for reading!