Haitian DIRT COOKIES - Galette | Hard Times - recipes & food from times of scarcity

Greetings my beautiful loves! It's Emmy. Welcome back to another episode of Hard Times where I explore

food

and

recipes

from lean

times

. Today I will explore a recipe that comes from Haiti. Now, I've been hearing about this recipe for a while, and it's for earthen

cookies

, also known as bon bon terre or bon bon te or

galette

. And these

cookies

were presented as a way to fill your belly cheaply. Each small cookie disk costs about five cents. Women were shown making them and then selling them and children eating them. So Haiti is a very impoverished country and has become increasingly dependent on international exports, and with rising

food

costs, many people cannot afford or buy food, so these earth cookies were presented as a way to deal with hunger and hunger pangs, and also a way to earn a small amount of money.

So in my research, I found a video from the World Food Program (I'll link it below) here on YouTube that explains a little more information about these

dirt

crackers or crackers. There is actually a longer history of eating these cookies and it's not just to deal with hunger. Therefore, pregnant women often ate these cookies during pregnancy as a source of nutrition and minerals. And in fact, it's quite common for pregnant women to feel certain urges or cravings that they wouldn't normally have if they weren't pregnant. It is believed that the fetus tells the mother what nutrients and minerals she needs.

So, of course, clay and soil contain natural minerals and pregnant women often feel satiated when they have that little bit of clay or soil and receive those minerals. And they discover that the taste is really delicious. Therefore, the practice of eating

dirt

, soil, or clay is called geophagy and has been found in recorded history for millennia. I had heard about this Haitian soil cookies recipe for a long time, but I didn't have any clay sources. But thanks to the lovely Rachel, who sent me a link to Grandma's Georgia White Dirt, I was able to purchase this bag of dirt.

This soil is more specifically kaolin clay. It is used in many different things besides ceramics, including medicines, such as Kaopectate (Kaopectate as of 2003 actually does not contain kaolin, but at one time it did), as well as Maalox and Rolaids and other anti-diarrheal drugs and medications. And the clay is believed to absorb impurities and can also be used to treat food poisoning and of course kaolin clay is also used for face masks and is often found in toothpaste. It sounds a little strange, but it's actually more common than you might expect. Therefore, the practice of eating dirt and clay can be found all over the world, including Africa.

That is why it is believed that enslaved people brought the practice from Africa to the United States and even today you can go to flea markets or flea markets or go online and buy clay for the specific purpose of eating it. With a little background, let's go ahead and make these cookies. And here it is and if I scratch it with my fingernail, it's pretty soft, like talcum powder. It's very, very fine like talcum powder (I think on the

hard

ness scale, talcum powder is considered the softest) and it doesn't smell like anything. So on Grandma's website they say you can sterilize it by baking it at 350 degrees for about an hour or just putting it in the microwave for a few minutes.

So she says let's put it in a brown paper bag, which I'll do... Okay, and that's to sterilize it, so here's my clay. I just took it out of the microwave and the instructions warned not to burn it. So, A word of warning now, I'm going to use a hammer and smash the clay chunks. Wow, it's difficult. So the way a microwave works is that it heats the water that is inside whatever you are heating. So the small amount of water that was in this clay, which made it quite soft and easy to scrape, was heated and therefore sterilized our clay, but also made it much

hard

er.

So for those who eat this as is, it probably affects the type of especially textural experience in the mouth. So it's a lot harder than it was before, so I notice that when I break it with a hammer. Now the reason I do this is to make it much easier when I add the water I want these bits of clay to dissolve Now let's add our water mmm did you hear that sizzling clay was hot Amazing oh my god look that instantly it turns into amazing clay Oh, it has a lovely smell It smells Kind of like, I think the word is petrichor.

One of my favorite words. It smells like wet cement. It's like just when it starts to rain that smell of wet cement that represents childhood and riding a bike. That's what it smells like, it smells pretty good. So because the clay is hot listen to that. It's turning into a beautiful white clay, so I'm using I have my hands here to try to squish this. So what I find really interesting about this recipe is that and a lot of the media. This comes across as very, very desperate. It's understandable, but what I think is more interesting is.

There is actually a history of eating this not only during

times

of famine but as a supplement for pregnant women. Absolutely fascinating. It makes a lot of sense. Now that I have this paste, I still have chunks of clay in there. So now let's refine it further. What I have here is a plastic bucket that I cleaned. This is food grade. I just bought it at my local bakery. I'm going to use an old cloth napkin and place it on top and this will be my type of filter. Take some yarn and wrap it around the top.

I tighten it even more, I'm going to use a stick and twist this now. I want this to be very, very tight because this is going to be the filter that I'm going to process my Play in, so take a handful of this and just rub it in. So the idea is that the chunks stay on top and the clay stays nice and smooth. is pressed through the cloth. There are other ingredients in these cookies as well. This also contains salt and margarine which I will add in the next steps in the videos I saw that the type of clay seemed a little different.

While it looked nice and fine like this clay, it was more of a yellow tone, so its mineral composition was probably different than this clay, but I wanted to make sure I got clay that was of edible purity. Alright, here's my refined clay that I put in a container so you can see it better and now we're going to spice this up. Now, I found a blog post that said it was ten parts clay to about one part salt and one part margarine, which doesn't seem quite right to me because it seems like a lot of salt, but this is clay afterwards. all.

It's probably pretty soft, but some seems like a lot, but anyway, I'm going to add about half a teaspoon of salt and two teaspoons of melted margarine. Stir everything. Here I have a baking dish lined with parchment paper, traditionally these would be placed on a cloth like a sheet and left to dry in the sun, but I'm going to speed things up and do it in my oven. Okay, let's go ahead and shape our cookies, put a tablespoon on it and then just spread it out. in a circle So with a big heaping tablespoon I'm going to put them in a 350 degree oven and bake them for about 20 minutes until they're hard.

But we don't want them to be too firm. Well, see you in a bit! Very good! So I'm back and here are my mud or dirt cookies. As you can see here, if this one was too thin, it was baked a little too long. So what I found was at 350 degrees for the thickness of the clay I applied, it was a little too hot. So I reduced the temperature to 300 degrees and cooked them for about 20 minutes and it seemed to work better. There was still some cracking, but not as bad as this, so I made sure not to overbake them.

In the BBC video where the journalist tries them, he said they had the texture of chocolate, firm and crunchy but not as hard as if you were, you know, biting into a rock. Here's what it looks like at the bottom and let me break it down for you. This is what it looks like there. It doesn't have any smell. So let's go ahead and try it. Here we go. Itadakimasu! Wow! It's an amazing reaction: every drop of saliva that enters your mouth is instantly absorbed by the clay. It is a little salty, both from the salt and the added margarine;

The taste is actually very similar to the petrichor smell I described earlier. The experience in the mouth is very interesting because all the moisture in the mouth is absorbed by the clay, which becomes a mud-like texture in the mouth. It's a little gritty, but has a much finer texture than you might imagine. It's not gritty, just a little gritty, and I think it has to do with that refinement process of pushing the clay through the fabric. Then it becomes doughy and you have to take very small bites, because it absorbs all that water. There you have it: Haitian soil cookies, bonbon tea or

galette

.

It is certainly not tasty or delicious by our usual methods, but this is something that arises from necessity and practicality. When there is not much to eat, this will help you. When you crave some nutritional supplement, this will help you. Thank you very much to everyone who suggested this recipe. Thanks, Rachel, for giving me the link to Grandma's White Dirt. Also, consider making a donation to the anti-hunger project. I'll put a link below. Please share this video with your friends and follow me on social media. Like this video, subscribe and we'll see it in the next one.

Todoloo! Take care! Bye bye!!! Hello?