The quest for the perfect pandesal and the sacrifice for second best

Image from burninglove.i.ph

One of my favorite breakfast items, and I'm sure of a lot of you as well, is hot pandesal.  Though it comes in a lot of sizes and baking consistencies, how one wants his pandesal best  is a matter of personal preference.  Me, I want it not too crunchy on the outside, but very soft and a bit gummy on the inside.

My pandesal eating ritual starts by punching a hole into the side and using my thumb and index finger to dig out the soft inside, before depositing it into my waiting mouth.  And I would follow it up with a sip of coffee for good measure.

It is only when the pandesal is gutted of its inside do I pair it with any palaman that is available: cheese, egg, tuna, peanut butter, fruit jam, hotdog, and even condensed milk.  I was influenced by my wife to have something salty on the side, such as Mr Chips, Chippy and Tortillos, to balance off the tastes.  She takes her Pandesal with orange juice.

Another reason why I like pandesal for breakfast is that it is easy to prepare and clean after.  All it takes is a couple of small plates and a quick scan of what's inside the ref and breakfast is ready.  But lately, we are having pandesal less and less.  Not because we have grown tired of it, but because the two roving pandesal vendors have ceased to frequent our subdivision.

Their apparent disappearance started a few months ago when a neighbor, a family friend of ours, opened a new bakery.  And what is a bakery without hot pandesal, right?  Our neighbor is well liked in our community and so our small village, as a show of support, flocked to the bakery for our bread needs, me and my pandesal craving included.

But the new bakery's version of the pandesal, while a bit bigger, does not conform with my self-imposed specifications -- it is crunchy on the outside, and its core is dry and flaky like a croissant.   Plus, it does not heat well as a leftover bread, so unlike the pandesal delivered by one of  the ambulant vendors, which stays good even after two reheatings.

Though I have two regular roving suppliers, I like one better than the other  for several reasons.  First, and this is the most important -- his pandesal  aces all my criteria. Second, I get to know bits and pieces of his personal story; that he is from Samar but is married to a native of Lipa, or that the bakery that makes the bread that he sells is some 5 kilometers away from my place, and that where he lives is another 5 kilometers away going the opposite direction.  On a routine trip, he rides his bike -- a BMX rigged to hold a styropore bread box -- approximately 25 kilometers, and he does this twice, once in the morning, and another in the afternoon where he stakes another subdivision.

Monay, an alternative to pandesal

Which brings me to the third reason why I like him more.  He just seems more hardworking than  my other pandesal source, who sells his bread aboard his motorbike.  Not once did I hear him complain about how hard life is for someone of his kind.  I can sense his brimming pride for his work, which says a lot about the kind of man that he is.

Before the neighbor's bakery opened, and when I had the urge for pandesal, I would usually relax inside the house and wait for the pot-pot sound that heralds pandesal is coming.  When I am not in a hurry, I peek outside to see who is coming.  If it's the vendor on the motorbike, I don't come out and wait some more till my favored suki comes.

I did have a third option but it meant me literally sacrificing a leg.  Some 50 meters from our house is a store that also sells hot pandesal, on consignment from another village.  It is really just a short walk and the pandesal there is not half bad.  But halfway, I often encounter a black dog that, out of so many people that pass by, it's only me that he snarls and growls upon.  This dog has a personal grudge on me, and no one else. I don't understand why but I have a theory.

You see this dog looks really menacing, but also laughable.  His head and torso are that of a mean and powerful doberman, but his legs are short and stout like those of a daschund.  Perhaps, this dog's insecurity with his less than developed extremities has found a target in my long, lean legs.   I am, after all, an inch above six feet.

Images from 22dog.com and greatdogsite.com

So you can imagine the absurdity of our confrontations as I try to cross the dog's territory to get to the store: A tall, long legged man being threatened by a short but powerful, muscular dog.  I have seen too much of Cesar Millan's The Dog Whisperer to know that, when a dog bares his teeth and growls and moves forward, he means business -- or in my case, to take some inches off my ridiculously long legs.

I am just thankful that, although humans tend to covet what they don't have, or secretly eye another person's body part that he deems better than his, we don't normally resort to violence or malicious threats.  Imagine what kind of world we would have if the stout pummels the slim, or the short maims the tall, or the slow bashes the intelligent, or the curly-haired trims the straight-haired.  Insecurity plus envy, bad combination --resulting into chaos, major chaos because everyone is insecure, one way or another.

That damned dog has the habit of derailing me, first my trip to the store, then this story.  Now where were we?

When the neighbor's bakery opened, the two roving vendors' visits became noticeably less frequent.  But having been disappointed by the flaky pandesal, I would patiently wait for the familiar pot-pot sound so that I can source my preferred bread.  At times, they came, often they did not.  And that meant either settling for the pandesal/croissant or brave the threat of the insecure short-legged dog, or take the last option, which is to forego bread altogether.

The last time I saw my favorite vendor was also the last time I heard his pot-pot.  I was patiently waiting for him to pass, but almost 15 minutes have elapsed and still no sign of him or his pot-pot.  Not prepared to prolong my hunger, I decided to go to the bakery and settle for the pandesal/croissant.  But on my way back to the house with a small paper bag of bread in my hands, I heard a familiar sound coming my way -- it was my favorite vendor.  But when he was near me he simply breezed by without looking, nor asking if I wanted his pandesal, which he always did every time we chanced upon each other.  He did not even press his rubber horn to sound off pot-pot.  Instead, he just pedalled forward, head bowed and eyes steely focused in front of him.  I wanted him to stop, or look at me so that I could explain that I waited for him.  But he never did.  He simply pressed on. And that was the last time I saw him selling pandesal in our village.



POSTSCRIPT:  The neighbor's bakery has since stopped producing pandesal on weekdays, and instead offers them only on weekends.  Still, the roving vendors no longer came back.