Pan de Coco Cooking Experience

Pan de coco is the everyday bread of the Garifuna coast, and it starts with a coconut and nothing you’d expect. No milk, no eggs, no butter. The richness comes entirely from the coconut: fresh milk pressed from the grated flesh, worked into a soft, lightly sweet roll. On this three-hour class you make it the way it’s been made for generations, by hand.

You’ll grate the coconut, press the milk, build and knead the dough, then shape and bake the rolls. Garifuna recipes were traditionally never written down, passed instead from mother to daughter, so a class like this is how the technique stays alive. The result is a dense, tender roll that’s meant to be torn open beside a bowl of fish stew, though warm from the oven it needs nothing at all.

Coconut is the heart of the Garifuna kitchen. The Honduran Garifuna cook Isha Gutiérrez-Sumner, who wrote the first Garifuna cookbook, names the four pillars of the cuisine as coconut, cassava, community and continuity. Pan de coco belongs to the first of those.

Meeting point
The Dibasei office in Livingston. Walk over if you’re staying in town, or come in by lancha if you’re visiting just for the tour.