el crispito

Okay, a bolillo is similar to french bread, and is made with wheat flour. Usually, it's bleached flour, but you can get delicious bolios at the pan integral (whole wheat) bakeries also.

Oh yeah, in Mexico, you often have bakeries that make just whole wheat things, including whole wheat raised, frosted donuts.

The bolillo is usually about five to seven inches long, has tapered ends making it oval in shape, and is cut across the top before baking to give it a slightly irregular surface and a little more crust.

Oh, that's right. I should have mentioned before that the bolillo is crusty on the outside and very soft on the inside. That's what makes it like french bread.

It's used to make tortas, the most well-known around here being tortas ahogadas. If you don't know Spanish, 'ahogadas' means 'drowned.'

I forget that most Mexican food as represented around the world doesn't include tortas, so maybe I should explain those too. Tortas are sandwiches, somewhat comparable to submarine sandwiches, hoagies, poor boys and grinders. Mexicans are not all that big on the miscellaneous vegetables though, so you often get just meat, bread and some kind of sauce. In the torta ahogada, the sauce is on the outside of the whole thing, like a 'smothered burrito.'

Still with me?

The torta ahogada is fried pork, onions and beans (but honestly, it's 99% pork) stuffed into a bolillo, then 'drowned' in a spicy tomato and chile sauce. It is known as a specialty of Guadalajara, and they are sold everywhere - in restaurants, from street vendors, in loncherías...

Ah, hold on. That is something a little strange. Usually it's people from Mexico City (defeños, chilangos) that call sandwiches on bolillos 'tortas.' It's usually not called a torta here, but rather, a lonche. That's not 100% solid; a lot of people are going to call a turkey sandwich a torta de pavo, but you see lonche used around here just as much if not more than torta, except when you're talking about tortas ahogadas. It's never called a lonche ahogado. It's always a torta ahogada.

Yet I stray from my point, although it is important to bear all that in mind for understanding my point.

The point is, I learned recently from Alberto that the type of bolillo used in Guadalajara and surrounding environs is a special type of bolillo called a birote. Birotes are particular to Guadalajara, and are perhaps best described as sort of a sourdough bolillo. I don't know the exact difference between the two, but the birote tastes slightly sour, like a light sourdough. People here describe them as salados when you go to buy them and they think that as a non-native tapatio you don't realize the difference. However, they're not called bolillos salados, they're called birotes. Well, except on the little labels that the bakery at the supermarket sticks on the bags, in which case, then they're just called bolillos.

Combining all that information then, we see that a lonche is usually going to be made with a birote, and a torta is going to be made with plain bolillo.

Of course, that is apart from the torta ahogada, the specialty of Guadalajara, made on birote, yet called a torta all the same.

Oh, and I should mention that there's another regional type of bolillo that's from Mexico City and is called telera, but that's a topic for an entirely different entry.

More on Birote, en español.