No Half Measures

14 Mar 2020

We visited San Francisco and stayed in Bernal Heights, which has a wonderful variety of central American restuarants! The two new cuisines I had the opportunity to try were Nicaraguan and Salvadorean - and this adventure is specifically about making Salvadorean pupusas.

Pupusas are shockingly simple, really. The dough is just 3 ingredients: corn flour, salt and water. The filling appears to be whatever you want to eat inside your pupusa, but usually beans, cheese, pork, squash or a vaguely named “Salvadorean vegetables” mix that I haven’t quite figured out yet.

I had some leftover carnitas, so the first batch I made was cheese, carnitas and refried beans. We used this recipe for the dough and as a vague guideline for the filling.

They were delicious, but ugly! The filling came out through cracks in the dough, so they did not resemble the beautiful pupusas we ate in California.

After watching a few more YouTube videos - this one was particularly helpful - we decided to try again.

Here’s what we learned this time:

• the dough must be wet. As in really wet, so that it sticks to your hands and you actually need the water/oil mixture to keep it from sticking. The first few I made did not have enough water in the dough, and you can tell because it cracked everywhere. Once we added a lot more water, it was better and you could smooth over the cracks like in the video!
• use the filling sparingly. This dish is clearly meant to make a small amount of filling into as many servings as possible by putting only a little bit in each pupusa.
• it would have been better if our filling was thicker. We mixed 3 sauteed and pureed onions with 16 oz of wilted and pureed spinach, 16 oz of shredded cheese, 1/2 can refried beans and one can drained red kidney beans. This was nowhere near as solid as the filling in the video, and doesn’t allow you to form the dough around it as easily. Instead we created a bowl out of dough and then pinched the top closed over it.
• wet your hands a lot! That’s what the oil and water mixture is for, so use it! I didn’t like dripping everywhere, but it was necessary.
• it would have been better to make the dough in smaller batches (I did 2 batches total) right before we wanted to use it. Otherwise you have to add water before you use it, becuase it dries out quickly.

We cooked one up after making a few to ensure that we actually liked the filling - delicious. For how simple these are, they’re tasty, and it’s easy to make a huge batch. With 2 batches of dough and a bowl of filling, we made around 40! Now we just have to get better at the filling technique and these will likely become a staple.