The Perfect Snack

SUCRE -- Two foods have long competed for status as my favorite snack: the empanada, and soup in a bread bowl. The empanada combines pastry and meat in compact form, tasty and handy for lunch on the go or as the main entree in a balanced sit-down meal. While providing a substantial meal at low cost, the delicious and hearty soup in a bread bowl eliminates the need to wash a dish or add to landfill trash, as you can actually eat the container.

Bolivia, it seems, has managed to do the impossible, combining the best parts of soup in a bread bowl and the empanada. The tasty treat is called a salteña, a special kind of empanada full of a kind of stew, with either chicken or beef. It´s like soup in a bread bowl that you can actually carry down the street, eating on the run without utensils. Restaurants all over Bolivia serve them as a morning snack from about 10 a.m. to noon, and Sucre prides itself as having the best salteñas in the nation. In late morning here, people crowd around street vendors and salteñerias, eating them with little spoons to scoop out the stew, or, as the real locals do (or at least they say they do) without the benefit of a spoon. Only attempt this feat very carefully unless you want to end up with salteña all over yourself, as happened to me on my first try.

The name salteña comes from the city in Argentina, Salta. Legend has it that a woman from Salta (hence, she was a salteña) started making the special kind of empanada after she was exiled to Bolivia and fell on hard times in the early 1900s. So now they´re called salteñas, even though Sucre is the center of the salteña universe. Apparently in Salta, they serve a different kind of empanada altogether.