Typical Products
Nuestra Señora del Socorro de Benalup Bakery
If you come to Benalup-Casas Viejas you should not forget to come to this enterprise and see its products.
Almost 40 years ago, when the village started to flower, after very hard times, a young marriage, Isabel and Feliciano, learnt how to do almond sweets and rolls. With a lot of work and very little income, they set up sweet shop where sell their products along with sweets (sent by the bus of Cádiz) and many things more.
They also learnt to make ice creams made of cow milk, sugar, eggs, and vanilla. They made it in a barrel which was manually rotated around another recipient with crushed ice. Trying over and over, after several recipes, some fails, many hits and many years, the enterprise was consolidated.
Currently, they tell, to be proud of having a name within the region, without stop being a family enterprise and completely traditional although the ownership has been passing from the parents to their two children: Lidia y Ricardo. Their idea is to promote and expand as much as possible, the market of the most traditional products of the enterprise and the village, like the rolls, fried doughnuts, olive oil cakes, milk cakes… and overall, those in which our heritage from al-andalus remains in the use, like for instance, the honey, with its best product which is the piñonate of Benalup-Casas Viejas and also the pestiños (honey-coated fritter). On the other hand, they try to be on the avant-garde of designs, models and flavors of cakes; theirs are famous because of their variety and creativity.
Regarding the projects of future, they tell us that they are doing the proper paperwork for the construction of a bigger bakery, with more space for the machinery and workers, a project that they hope to end this year.
San Martín Bakery-Patisserie
In June 1975 it is founded in Benalup-Casas Viejas the BAKERY-PATISSERIE SAN MARTIN, owned by Martina Buendía Frías, an enterprise that belonged to Manuel González Pérez, denominated Nuestra Señora del Socorro. In those years, it was not easy to found a new bakery, but it was made through transfer fee, that is, by purchasing what they called the business sheet.
At the beginning BAKERY-PATISSERIE SAN MARTÍN, was completely traditional and a family business. It had not any employee as the matrimony and the children used to work in spite of their short age. The production was minimum and they had very little income, and that was the reason they started with two machines of second hand and an oven. The head of the family used to do the home delivery of bread and handmade sweets (cakes, rolls, almond sweets, etc) delivered throughout the streets of the village by horse, the only mean of transport they had.
The products they have nowadays are abundant and varied. Talking about bread, they have several types of bread like the integral bread, dark bread, tin loaf, Vienna bread and the common bread, being this last one, the most sold out one.
Regarding the pastries and the patisserie it has a great variety of products among which it is remarkable: the roll of Easter, better known as "rosquetes", the handmade almond sweets, the olive oil and sugar cake, without forgetting about a great variety of fine pies and cakes for communions, baptisms, weddings, birthdays, etc.
The market is fundamentally local, more than the 75% of the production is sold in Benalup-Casas Viejas, directly to the public in our vending point or through supermarkets and grocery stores that sell our products and the resting 25% is distributed to inns and restaurants of the area.
BAKERY-PATISSERIE SAN MARTIN, has the project, in a next future, to move the facilities to the neighborhood of El Matadero, in the street Malavasía 16, with the aim to improve and increase the production. Nowadays it is located in the street Independencia 24, a local of small dimensions and where, due to its production, the work is difficult. The project would consist in building new facilities, increasing the machinery, increasing the production and so, creating new job positions and giving the consumer a better quality and service.
