“For two days no one has eaten it,” laments Luciano, a resident of the San Luis de Sancti Spíritus neighborhood, as he shows some neighbors this Friday morning the ration bread. In the midst of the wheat flour deficit, state bakeries in several areas of this city must add up to 20% of rice husking residue to the dough, a mixture that makes it sandy in texture and sour in taste.
“Even with the biscuits they are using it and they are hard, very hard,” adds the retiree, who, after buying last Thursday at the regulated bakery, returned to claim the employee for the poor quality of the product. “We can’t do anything, they have instructed us to add up to 20% straw and rice tips,” explained the worker. However, nowhere in the store is there a sign warning customers about the new recipe.
“She told me because she has known me all her life but they have not been told that they must inform consumers about this change,” laments the retiree. The employee confessed to Luciano that “when they make the new formula, all the rice straw rises and it is very difficult to mix it. The bakers are very upset with this because they are the ones who show their faces at the end.”
“This has normally been used as feed for pigs, because it includes the rice straw and also grain tips. As animal feed it is not bad, but to make bread it is not very useful”
Another worker at a bakery in the neighborhood of Viento Negro confirms 14ymedio the change in the preparation of the bread that, he assures, began to be implemented this week, although it is not the first time that other products have been added to the flour to stretch it. “They bring the sacks of waste from the mills on the Jíbaro highway, where the rice is husked,” he explains.
“This has normally been used as feed for pigs, because it includes the rice straw and also grain ends. As animal feed it is not bad, but to make bread it is not very useful.” The man from Sancti Spiritus details that “before this ‘invention’, the peasants who raise pigs paid about 250 pesos for a can of this waste, they cooked it and there they had something to feed them.”
However, in the mixture with wheat flour and for human consumption, the state employee considers that “the final dough dries out and that is why the bread crumbles as if it were sand. It also darkens, and what does not enter through the eyes it doesn’t go through the mouth: people buy it and come back with it because they get scared when they cut it, as soon as they see it with that dark yellowish color”. To add to the problem, “the taste is bad, like a sack, like straw.”
Mixing other ingredients with wheat flour to make ration bread is nothing new. In the crisis of the 1990s and also in recent months, state bakeries have used sweet potatoes, yuccas and plantains to meet demand. But these mixtures have failed to convince customers, who claim that with these additions the bread can be kept for less time due to the heat and, to top it off, it quickly takes on a sour taste.
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