
A few days ago I shared how I made the stew for the famous Venezuelan hallacas. As I mentioned then, it was my first time making stew on my own, and although I tasted it and it was good, I wasn't sure how the hallacas would turn out. About a week ago (the day after making the stew), we made the hallacas as a family.

We didn't really take pictures of the process because we were quite busy, each of us had a special task and I felt quite different this year preparing the hallacas, since normally it is a very stressful and exhausting job but this time we did everything calmly and with a lot of love, time flew by and we finished quite quickly.

While we were preparing them, we drank wine and ate peanuts. We made them very differently than usual, since we normally put very little filling inside each hallaca, but this time we made it super stuffed and with a thinner dough than before. We learned from some mistakes, and even though it's a dish we only make once a year, we've taken note of everything that can be improved for future occasions… Thanks to this, I feel that this year we've prepared the most delicious hallacas so far, haha.


We had some difficulties. For example, before we even started arranging everything on the table to make the hallacas, we realized the capers had a bad smell. They were spoiled, or I don't know what happened. I went to buy more at a different place than the one I bought them from originally, and they came completely sealed, so I trusted them. When I got home, they were just like the others—they had a peculiar smell and tasted exactly as they smelled, absolutely disgusting. In the end, I decided to play it safe and bought the capers again at a supermarket, this time in jars since those are supposed to never go bad. And guess what? They were just as disgusting. Seriously, it was a horrendous taste that never went away, even after we soaked them for a while. I'm sure if we had put those in our hallacas, we would have ruined them completely.

Luckily everything went well and we enjoyed our Hallacas… In total we made 90 hallacas, we could have made many more but we were very generous with the stew this time hahaha, but I don't regret it because they are exquisite and the flavors are very strong.
