Jesse Learns a New Dish: Pupusas de Calabaza! (Salvadorian Stuffed Masa Cakes)

 

Okay, so I was chatting with a bar guest the other day.  He hails from El Salvador, he likes margaritas, and he's a good tipper!  Anyway, he told me his next dream, after moving to the US, starting a business, and buying a house, was to open a Salvadorian-style restaurant, serving the foods he grew up with.  I asked him, (only) half-joking, if he needed a chef.  He asked me if I knew anything about Salvadorian cuisine, and my answer was a resounding no.

He told me about his favorite dish, the objectively fun-to-say pupusa.  A pupusa is a masa pancake, filled with a savory filling.  It is served with a pickled cabbage slaw called curtido, lime wedges, and traditional Salvadorian tomato salsa.  I set out to learn it, post-haste.  I went with the squash variety, but these come in a dozen varieties.  Slow-cooked pork seemed popular, but I only had an afternoon to get this done.

I didn't even bother with my own library.  I own zero books on Central American cuisine.  I went straight to the internet.  For the pupusas themselves, I used the recipe from A Cozy Kitchen.  (Note: I did change one thing.  My bar guest had specified that the curtido, not the pupusas, were spicy.  Cozy kitchen had jalapeno in the pupusas themselves, and their recipe for curtido [apart from being really imprecise], had no spice to it, so I omitted the chiles from the pupusas, and used a different curtido recipe.)

For the accoutrements, I went to two other websites, after a little googling.  My curtido recipe came from Hispanic Kitchen, and my salsa roja came from International Cuisine.  

How did it come together?

Well, the pupusas themselves were a bit of a processs.  I'll cover the exact procedure for making them shortly, but it was straightforward, time-consuming, but not at all difficult.  A quick dough of masa flour and water, wrapped around a filling of butternut squash (simply roasted, mashed, and seasoned) and Oaxaca cheese (the recipe called for mozzarella, but Oaxaca is Latin America's answer to mozzarella, with all the stretch and a more pronounced flavor).  

The curtido was super easy.  The only hassle was remembering that it needed to marinate for a few hours.  It was a straight quick pickle.  Cabbage, carrots, onions, and japaleno, with seasoned, Mexican oregano-infused vinegar poured over it.  Note, the recipe says it needs to 'ferment' overnight.  This is incorrect.  First, it's not a ferment, it's a vinegar pickle.  Second, three hours is fine.  I tasted it after it sat overnight, and it was almost the same.  (Also, two weeks later, it's still pretty good.)  

The salsa was also trivially easy.  Fresh tomatoes, chiles, garlic, and onions, cooked into a simple sauce.  (The recipe called for optional cilantro, but I had a little supply chain problem, so no cilantro in mine.  It would have been nice, though, for the record.)

All told, an afternoon's work.  If you put the squash in the oven and then make the curtido (30 minutes work time), your squash can be cooling while you set everything up for the pupusas, and the whole thing is an afternoon project, working at a leisurely pace.

The pupusa assembly process:

Once you have the filling, the cheese, and the masa ready to go, it's pretty straightforward.  Couple hints:

1) Use a 2oz. ice cream scoop to form the dough balls.  Takes out a ton of guesswork.

2) Beware, if you've never worked with masa.  It has no gluten at all, so it doesn't act like any other dough.  No stretch, no bounce, and no structural integrity.  It will crack on you like it's nothing.

3) Happily, masa is very forgiving.  If it cracks, patch it up.  If a little filling pokes through, don't sweat it.  If you're griddling, and some cheese runs out onto the griddle, great!  That's a brown crispy bit!

4) One thing I should have done but didn't is flatten the pupusas between a couple sheets of deli paper.  You can see the ridges where my fingers formed them, and they would have colored more evenly if I'd taken more care.  Live and learn.

The Verdict?

Pretty good!  Glad I tried it.  The crispy-yet-chewy pupusas great on their own, but the curtido was an absolutely necessary foil!  The salsa didn't add a whole lot, but in the context of a Salvadorian kitchen, where there's probably always salsa around, it makes sense.  It didn't detract, but I'm not convinced it was worth a dedicated recipe.  I don't know if I'd bother with the exact dish again, but I feel a lot more confident working with masa (up to now, I'd only made sopes and tamales).  

One great bonus: they freeze really well!  You just freeze them on a sheet tray (with parchment), and then pop them off in a plastic bag.  You can cook them straight from frozen, it will just take a little longer.

-js