ROSKETE

All over the Hispanic world, there are different kinds of rosquete.

The root word is rosco.  A rosco can mean a bread roll, a biscuit, a cookie....and many other similar things.

In the Spanish city of Cádiz, in the south of that country, they make a rosquete that looks like our own Chamorro version, but it is made with some ingredients not found in our own.

A kind of Spanish rosquete

So when Spaniards or Latin Americans brought the basic idea for rosquete to the Marianas, our people had to use ingredients that were available to them.

The Chamorro roskete is made of : flour, corn starch (a lot of it), sugar, butter, eggs and salt. Modern recipes add baking powder and vanilla extract (some use lemon extract), which I am pretty sure were not available in the Marianas 200 years ago. Even butter may not have been quite readily available in our islands 100 years ago or more. Some other shortening must have been used.

The Chamorro roskete is dry and crumbly. That is due to the large amounts of corn starch in the recipe. Because they are so dry and crumbly, mailing roskete to your loved ones off-island is an exercise in hope or optimism. They often become pulverized in the mail. Your loved ones in the States will receive roskete powder by the time it gets to them.

The traditional form of the roskete is to form loops with the rolled out dough. Many people today simply make medallions of the dough. Less work.

Personally, I prefer the "figure eight" traditional form of roskete. Because they are so dry, it is better to eat in smaller doses.

When a roskete is excellent, it has flavor. Am not sure if it is the vanilla extract or the eggs that impart that flavor. I know a lady who makes excellent roskete and claims it's because of her "secret ingredient." I have a suspicion it's Crisco.

But then there is roskete that has little to no flavor. It can become a mouthful of dry, sweet cookie crumbles in the mouth, best dissolved by a gulp of hot coffee.

Here's a video (in two parts, actually) showing how to make roskete according to one person's recipe :

And a link to another recipe for roskete :

http://www.annieschamorrokitchen.com/rosketti/