Almojábana: the cheese bun Bogotá eats with hot chocolate

Overview

An almojábana is a small round bun, pale gold, cracked across the top, and made of two things: maize flour and fresh curd cheese. The curd is not a filling. It is most of the dough, worked in until the mixture is heavy and slightly wet, which is why the finished bun is soft, faintly squeaky and sour rather than bready — there is very little flour in it doing the usual work of flour, and there is no yeast at all.

Eaten warm, which is the only way it should be met, it is springy and steams when you break it, and it tastes of milk before it tastes of anything else. Cold, four hours later, it is a different and much lesser object: dense, dry, and the reason people who have only tried one at a hotel breakfast are unimpressed.

It is a regional thing rather than the city’s own invention. The version Bogotá sells comes down from the highland countryside around it — Boyacá and rural Cundinamarca, dairy country on a cold plateau — where the cheese in question, cuajada, is made daily and needs using. Other parts of the country make almojábanas quite differently: the coastal one is sweeter and uses a salty white cheese with unrefined cane sugar; further west the dough is cut with cassava starch. The name travels; the recipe does not.

The name itself is the oldest fact in the article, and it is checkable. It is Arabic — al-muǧabbana, “the cheesy one” — and it arrived through Andalusia, where a cheese pastry of the same name is medieval and documented. What crossed the Atlantic was the word and the idea of a cheese dough; what happened here is that wheat was replaced by maize and Spanish cheese by cuajada. That substitution is the whole of the dish’s history and it is more interesting than any legend, because it is visible in the ingredients rather than told about them.

For the visitor the useful frame is this: in Bogotá the almojábana is not a speciality, it is infrastructure. Every neighbourhood has a panadería and every panadería has a tray of them, and the city eats them at breakfast and again in the middle of the afternoon.

What to order

The word is enough: una almojábana. What takes practice is telling it apart from the things sitting beside it on the same tray, because a Bogotá bakery counter carries four or five pale round objects and they are not interchangeable.

• Almojábana — flattest and widest of the group, matt, cracked on top, made with cuajada. Sour, milky, soft.
• Pandebono — a rounder, glossier ball with cassava starch in it. Chewier, sweeter, and the one most often handed to a visitor who says “the cheese bread”.
• Pan de yuca — a crescent or ring, crisper, hollow inside.
• Buñuelo — deep-fried, spherical, dark gold. Different object entirely.

If you want to be understood immediately, point and say the word; if you want the good one, ask ¿acaban de salir? — have they just come out. Bakeries bake in batches through the morning and again in the afternoon, and a batch has a life of about half an hour before it is worth reheating rather than eating.

The standard pairing is hot chocolate, and the local habit with it is worth knowing before it surprises you: a piece of white cheese is dropped into the cup, and the almojábana is torn and dipped into the chocolate. Cheese in chocolate reads as strange for about one mouthful. Coffee works too — the usual order is a tinto, small and black — but the chocolate is the pairing the dish was built alongside.

Nobody adds butter, jam or anything else. There is already enough fat in it.

What to avoid

The single failure worth guarding against is the cold one. A tray sitting out at three in the afternoon under a plastic dome has been there since morning; a bag of them at a supermarket till has been there longer. If the counter is not warm, ask for one heated — caliente, por favor — and if the answer is that they cannot, buy something else.

The second is the industrial almojábana, which is identifiable before you taste it: perfectly uniform, glossy, domed rather than flat, with no cracks. Real ones are irregular because a wet curd dough is shaped by hand and splits as it bakes. The packaged version compensates for cheap cheese with sugar and comes out closer to a sweet roll.

Third, and specific to where visitors eat breakfast: the plated version at a hotel or a café on the main pedestrian axis of the historic centre, arriving cold on a saucer at several times what a bakery charges. This is a bun bought over a counter for coins, eaten standing or walking, and the moment it is plated something has gone wrong with the economics.

One thing that is not a warning sign: a queue at a bakery counter at seven in the morning or around four in the afternoon. Those are the two batch hours in this city, and the queue means you have arrived at exactly the right time.

Practicalities

Cheap, and worth knowing the order of magnitude: in an ordinary neighbourhood bakery, a few thousand pesos apiece — roughly the price of a coffee, and less than a bus fare. A café in the centre will charge several times that, and a hotel breakfast several times again. There is no version of this bun whose ingredients justify a serious price; what varies with money is the room, not the bun.

Two hours matter. Bogotá eats an almojábana at breakfast, from around six, and again at onces — the mid-afternoon break, roughly four to six, whose name comes from “elevenses” having slid down the clock. Bakeries bake for both. Between those windows you can still buy one, but you are buying an older one.

There is no season, and the thing to do with that fact is this: the city sits at high altitude and is cold and often wet in the late afternoon regardless of the month, which is precisely why the afternoon onces pairing of a warm bun and a cup of chocolate is a daily habit here and not a winter one.

Cash is easiest. Cards work in the larger chains and in cafés, but the small bakery on the corner may have a minimum, and the sum involved is small enough that coins are simpler. Buy one, eat it there, and buy a second if it was good — they do not travel, and the one in your bag will be a disappointment by the time you open it.