Binging With Babish Arepas
I unfortunately couldn't achieve an even golden brown on these.
Babish takes inspiration from Disney’s Encanto to offer an Arepa recipe
Difficulty: 1/5
Ingredient Availability: 5/5
Time: 50 minutes
There’s a pretty good arepa place not too far from my house. While I’ve only ever gotten ones loaded with chicken and veggies, I thought that the arepas themselves were pretty tasty. They have a nice texture, soft on the inside with a nice bite on the outside. Given how good they are from the restaurant, I had the idea that home made ones have got to be even better. I came across this recipe while browsing Binging with Babish’s website and that’s when all that went through my head. I thought it would be a great recipe to try, given his popularity and the fact that I had liked all the arepas I’ve had so far. On top of that, the recipe was inspired by the hit movie Encanto! (Which I haven’t seen) Needless to say, I had high hopes for this recipe.
Key Ingredients and Omissions:
I wish I had gotten a better cheese
Once again, there were no omissions for this recipe. However, there are some thing I wish I had changed. The recipe has very few ingredients and is pretty simple, so don’t leave anything out.
I wish I was able to find Oaxaca cheese instead of the shredded low moisture mozzarella that I did use. I feel like it may have had more flavor and would’ve matched the recipe better. Although this isn’t noted in the recipe, Babish does give this alternative in the video version of the recipe.
Somehow I already had the masarepa, also known as pre-cooked white corn flour. I used the PAN brand, and it worked just fine making the dough.
Tools:
Hands
Cooking Review:
Mixing Dough: 7 minutes
To start off, I mixed all the ingredients except for the butter and cheese in a bowl. As the recipe recommended, I added the cornflour in batches, which should prevent any pesky lumps from forming. This step was followed by a 4 minute rest.
Kneading and forming Dough: 9 minutes
After adding the butter and cheese, I kneaded the dough, which was very easy to work with. For me, the recipe had the perfect ratio of water to flour so that it wasn’t too dry or wet. I then portioned the dough into 7 balls before pressing them into relatively thick disks. I could’ve weighed the dough to get 8 even arepas, but I was honestly too lazy to do that for such a simple recipe.
Arepa dough before butter and cheese
Arepa dough ready to be cooked
Cooking: 12 minutes per arepa, 33 minutes total
After brushing my griddle with butter, I added 3 arepas at a time and let them sit untouched for 7 minutes on the first side. I took them off the heat after 5 more minutes on the opposite side and more or less followed this timing for the remaining 4 arepas. I did have a slight sticking problem, which I tried to solve by brushing on more butter on the next batches. Unfortunately, that didn’t help much. Good thing the sticking wasn’t horrible, it was just a few areas around the arepa that I could scrape up fairly easily. I also noticed that I wasn’t getting the even gold brown color that could be seen in Babish’s video and recipe picture.
Add plenty of butter to your pan or griddle
Analysis:
I tasted these arepas both with and without extra cheese stuffed in them and I hate to say it, but it was a pretty big letdown. I will say that it could be the cheese, which was severely lacking in flavor itself (I should have known this would be the case). Whether the extra cheese was added or not, these arepas just tasted like cooked cornmeal, which is exactly what they are, essentially. They aren’t bad or inedible, but I definitely didn’t want to finish one after I took a bite out of it. On the more positive side, the texture was pretty nice, with a fluffy inside and crisp outside. So, there is definitely a good starting point with this recipe, it just needs something extra to give it some more flavor. I highly recommend getting a better cheese than what I got, perhaps the Oaxaca that I said that I wish I had used if I could find it. There’s still a chance that the cheese change could still not be enough, but that will have to be tested at another time. The best that these Arepas were was when I had them along side some sausage where the juices soaked into them. They do soak up flavors well, so I wouldn’t mind having them along something juicy so I can sop up the drippings. All in all, I can’t give this recipe anything higher than a 5/10. Even though it is a very quick and easy recipe, the result was just too bland and uninteresting. It’s not often I eat something that’s hard to keep eating, even in such small quantities. I would say that maybe I’m not an Arepa fan, but the restaurant mentioned at the start of this review would say otherwise.
