Salvadoran Sweet Bread / Semitas De Dulce (Sweet Stuffed Bread)

This Salvadoran Sweet Bread / Semitas De Dulce is a traditional bread stuffed with panela/jaggery. A delicious twist on the classic recipe is to use your favorite jam as a filling.

You have to taste the culture to understand it.

We travel for many reasons.  To explore, for love, for glory, for adventure, for thrills, to get away from reality, to relax.  For the new and the familiar, for sensory thrills and serenity, for socialization and isolation, for risk and reward, for the journey and the story and the secrets.  I travel for all these reasons.  Which is all just another way of saying that I travel to eat.

It’s a pleasure, always, to eat good food. It’s the truth of a place—you don’t really know the soul of Rome until you’ve taken a bite of squid ink pasta, or the soul of San Francisco without the perfect Sourdough, a soft hopper in Sri Lanka, a perfect pot sticker in Beijing, or, in this case a beautiful soft bread stuffed with pineapple compote in El Salvador.  You come back with stories to tell.  However we tell it, what we eat wherever we are is an anchor: a universal, a common human thread.  My itineraries are often just outlines of the most efficient routes from one great bite to the next: restaurants to street vendors to markets to grocers to bakeries to drive-thrus to over-the-top tasting menus.

This sweet bread is popular all around Central America. However, this version of the sweet buttery bread stuffed with jam is found in El Salvador.  Sweet Bread/Semitas De Dulce is a popular dish that you can find it in bakeries throughout Central America.  When walking around touring the small (but quickly growing) El Salvador, you can see street vendors with their version.

Sweet bread / semitas de dulce is a yeast bread with a texture of a dense cake, traditionally stuffed with grated or crushed panela.  The gooey panela/jaggery gets all caramelized and delicious.  A few popular variations are fillings of pineapple jam or strawberry jam.

Here I’ve used MIXED FRUIT JAM from the blog. You can use any seasonal jam, and it tastes delicious.  I baked this sweet bread / semitas de dulce almost eight years ago for the first time, and I definitely need to make them more often than I do.

A few spice additions I like to add while making the bread dough is some cardamom (which I love), cinnamon, or any spice you like.  While making this bread, one thing to make sure is to let the dough double and even triple to get the perfect textured bread.  The traditional bread has these designs on top, and you can use the leftover dough to create any designs.  Let the bread cool down completely before you slice it.  It stays good for about four days in an airtight container.

5.0 from 1 reviews

Salvadoran Sweet Bread- Semitas De Dulce (Sweet Stuffed Bread)

 

Print

Prep time

2 mins

Cook time

40 mins

Total time

42 mins

 

This Salvadoran Sweet Bread / Semitas De Dulce is a traditional bread stuffed with panela/jaggery. A delicious twist on the classic recipe is to use your favorite jam as a filling.

Author: Ash

Recipe type: Breakfast

Cuisine: Spanish

Serves: 16

Ingredients

• Milk - ¾ cup
• Unsalted sweet butter - 8 tbsp or ½ cup,melted
• Sugar -1/4 cup
• salt -1/4 tsp
• Egg - 2 large
• active dry yeast - 1 packet or ¼ ounce or 1 tbsp
• All purpose flour - 5 cups
• Warm water -1/3 cup about 110 degrees
• For egg wash- 2 tbsp water and 1 egg
• Sugar for sprinkling on top, fine or turbanado
• Panela/ or hard jaggery for the stuffing or any marmalade(pineapple, rhubarb, strawberry, pineapple or apricot preserves)

Instructions

1. You could use a stand mixer or simple bowls and do it by hand.
2. In a mixing bowl, mix the sugar, melted butter and ¼ tsp. Mix it well with a wooden spoon until everything is incorporated.
3. In ⅓ cup of warm water, add the yeast and let it sit and bubble up for 10 minutes.
4. In a large mixing bowl, add the flour, beaten egg, butter mixture, mix it well with a wooden spoon. Mix it well until its all well incorporated and bring it to a floured surface and knead it for about 3 minutes. The dough will be sticky. Transfer to an oiled bowl and cover, let it rise for 2 hours.
5. Punch down after 2 hours and divide it into half.
6. Roll ½ the dough to a ¼ inch thickness and transfer it carefully to a 7-11 baking tray. Spread out the semita or crushed jaggery evenly over the flattened bread. At this point, you could spread jam too instead of the jaggery. Carefully roll the other ½ of the dough and lay it on top of the jaggery on the tray. Pinch the sides like you would crimp a pie, so the sugar doesn't ooze out.
7. With the remaining scrap pieces of dough decorate the top of the bread which is very traditional.
8. Bake at 350 degrees for about 30-40 minutes. Do not burn the tops. Bake in the lower rack of the oven or middle.
9. After about 40 minutes, take it out and let it cool completely on a rack. Cut and serve.

Wordpress Recipe Plugin by EasyRecipe

3.5.3229

*Please do tag me on Instagram @foodfashionparty if you make this, using the hashtag #foodfashionparty.  Check out my book MASALA AND MEATBALLS.

Stay in touch for more delicious food on Instagram and Pinterest. Follow on Snapchat (@ashfoodfashion) for daily doses of food.**