“I’ll take you to where the real bizcochos are made,” said my travel companion as we entered Cayambe, a small pueblo in the mountains about an hour and a half to the North of Quito. “All the other bizcochos that you see in the shops along the highway are simply imitations,” she claimed.
We diverted off the highway and wove through the narrow streets of the town center. We parked on a quiet side street in front of the municipal cemetery and walked past a flower shop, a bench of elderly mendigos wrapped in their blankets, and followed the scent of the baking bizcochos through a doorway, a patio and into the shop where an oven stood at one end and an entire wall was filled with racks of cooling bizcochos. They were being baked, sold and eaten, right there, on the spot in a tiny house-complex that belonged to the Father of the local parish.
Bizcochos are something I’ve found to be particularly Ecuadorian – a cross between a cookie and a biscuit, flaky and savory, served in oil-stained paper bags and often eaten with sweet coffee and queso de hoja. They are typical to the area surrounding the Imbabura region.
These particular bizcochos had a smoky flavor and a texture that crumbled on the tongue.
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