Alex! Alex! I actually wrote this story up right after it happened! (It was... ten years ago, OMG!) If you want even more hilarious details, here you go! Taken from my journal, with a few edits for clarity. :)
This year, as a group project for Spanish class, we were told to craft a traditional object, or cook a traditional food, for Día de los Muertos. I worked with my friend Jon, and we made two decent loaves of Bread of the Dead. Our friend Steve, a year below us in the Spanish program, worked with his classmates Priolo and Jiajing. Apparently, none of the three had ever cooked bread from scratch before, yet they attempted the exact same bread project Jon and I had.
The hilarity began immediately.
To begin with, the recipe for Bread of the Dead calls for orange zest. Not knowing what orange zest was, Steve asked our friend Alex. She told him that it involved grating the outer, orange part of the orange peel, but not the bitter white pith. This is, of course, entirely correct.
Steve began to grate the orange peel. After a while, however, he decided that it was too slow a process. So, he ditched the grater, took a knife, and chopped up centimeter-square chunks of whole orange rind, including the bitter white pith. These he dumped into the batter in place of orange zest.
Then, Priolo kneaded the dough. It’s normal for bread dough to get sticky while kneading; the solution is to add a handful of flour and continue kneading. Priolo, however, did not know this. So, when the dough got sticky, he poured cooking oil over the batter to make it slick. Yes, oil.
Eventually, Steve’s team got the dough kneaded up, and placed it in a bowl to rise. Now, this is where logic fails: for some inexplicable reason, they decided to put it in the freezer to rise. Because, clearly, microorganisms live and eat best in freezing temperatures. At least Jon caught this and corrected them before all their yeast had died.
Wonder of wonders, though, the bread did actually rise, and Steve’s team baked it and poured an orange glaze all over it. Steve alone had the courage to sample their creation. The verdict: the bread tasted greasy, and the orange chunks were, not unexpectedly, somewhat... bitter.
Things got even better the next day during Spanish class itself. Jon and I were in a different class than Steve; ours met later in the day. Upon arrival, everyone in the class shared the fruits of our labors, then settled down to start the lesson. Our professor, Señora Arjona, started off by telling us that all the food our class had produced was tasty and well-made. It contrasted greatly, she said, with some of the food brought in by the beginner’s class.
For example, she said, there was one group in the earlier class that had made what they claimed was Bread of the Dead. It didn’t look right, however; there were all sorts of yellow chunks in it. She had thought the chunks were kernels of corn, because that’s what they looked like, even though that made no sense. She was quickly disabused of this notion the instant she sampled the bread. It turned out, she said, that the yellow chunks were pieces of whole orange peel!
Señora Arjona then made a funny face, and concluded: boy, was it bitter!
Jon and I couldn’t stop laughing.
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