Country 51: El Salvador - Pupusas con salsa y curtido

Finding a recipe was difficult - there seems to be a few American people cooking El Salvadorian food but I wanted a recipe that was created by an El Salvadorian person. I couldn't find any food bloggers but then I looked on Youtube and found this recipe which is thankfully in English but looking through the channel of the Youtuber she also has similar recipes for pupusas in Spanish, as well as an abundance of other El Salvadorian recipes too. 

So we had the recipe!

The next stage was to find the ingredients. The main ingredient for the dough is cornflour, but not like the starchy thickening corn flour we add - more like very fine polenta, but not polenta itself because that's too gritty. I did have some cornmeal left over from when I cooked my Barbados dish which has been lingering resentfully in my cupboard but I wasn't sure if that was the right sort of thing that I needed either, so I ended up buying some other corn flour from Amazon but when it arrived it was almost exactly the same as the cornmeal I had already so I used a combination of them both. 

Then there was the trouble of the cheese. 

I've noticed that in quite a lot of Latin dishes they call for queso fresco which literally translates as "fresh cheese." There are some Mexican grocery stores in London that sells queso fresco but it was quite a trek and I couldn't be bothered, and Google was telling me that apparently Turkish cheese called beyaz peynir is a similar texture and flavour to queso fresco and luckily the international shop 5 minutes up the road from me had a huge range of beyaz peynir. Done and done. 

So I dedicated my afternoon to El Salvador. I didn't have anything else on either so I was able to stagger the cooking out throughout the day which meant that I didn't feel overwhelmed by doing it all at the same time. 

I started with the curtido which is a type of coleslaw. Apparently the earlier you make it the better it turns out so I made this mid-morning with just some shredded cabbage, a grated carrot, some onion and vinegar. You're also supposed to use Mexican oregano, or failing that regular oregano, but I didn't have any so I left it out.

I also prepared the beans early as well as the cheese. You have to blend the beans to make them quite mushy and then you fry them for about 10 minutes until they're about the consistency of play-dough. Similary, the queso fresco has to be kneaded until it also has a similar consistency of play-dough. And then, when you make the dough, that also needs to be a consistency to play-dough. 

So eventually I had everything ready: Dough, cheese, beans. Coleslaw was in the fridge and the salsa took about 10 minutes so I opted to do that at the end. 

Making the pupusas themselves was a bit tricky to try and get everything the right consistency. In the Youtube video I followed the woman who was demonstrating them had this beautiful technique which made it look so easy but I mostly battered them around in my hands trying to make them roundish but certainly not perfect. 

Cooking them was fast and easy. Somehow I managed to absolutely over-estimate the proportions and made about 12 pupusas for just one person (me) so I had loads of leftovers. 

And I'm not entirely sure I was convinced about them to be totally honest. At first I thought they were pretty good all things considered but then as I went on I thought they were a bit.. doughy. I didn't think there was enough beans or cheese in them but I couldn't figure out how to get more in without sacrificing the integrity of each pupusa. And because there was a lack of beans and cheese, it was also somewhat flavourless. I was glad to have the curtido (coleslaw) to add a bit of zing, and similarly with the salsa that I made (which was basically just a tomato sauce with some mixed herbs thrown in). 

I don't think I would make these again.