Let’s have a pupusa party!

Pupusa Party results. (Yes, this was the only one that turned out good enough to take a picture.)

Looking for something fun to do with your COVID co-confinees? Have a pupusa party! Making a serviceable pupusa turns out to be quite a challenge. But, though your early attempts will be comically inept, you’ll get better with practice and your mistakes will be delicious.

Mis En Place for pupusa party. It gets messier!

Pupusas are a national dish of El Salvador and a close cousin to the Mexican taco. They use the same lime-treated corn flour base, but instead of getting flattened into tortillas the dough is shaped around a variety of ingredients then griddled. In my travels I’ve had locoro pupusas (locoro is a tropical vine that is hard to find in the US, but you can buy the leaves frozen in some regions), bean-and-cheese pupusas, and “pupusas revueltas” which add meat to the cheese and beans and are more expensive. But because of the difficulty of making these as a novice, you’ll want to go with 100% revueltas.

Comically overfilled pupusa

The challenge is in shaping the dough without having it fall apart. It helps to have little bowls of oil and water nearby so you can adjust the dough if it’s too crumbly and dry, and keep the raw ingredients from sticking to your hands or work surfaces. This video shows you how it’s done, and the accompanying text has a good recipe for the special ground pork filling called chicarron. (It’s much closer to carnitas than to fried pork rind chicharrones, but not the same; do take the trouble to follow the recipe exactly.)

Pupusa progress, going let to right. Our results got a bit better toward the end.

The cheese can be good old shredded mozzarella, and the beans El Paso Traditional Style refried beans—one of the few commercial products I’ve found that’s better than what you can make at home. Have an even quantity of each of these three items available, mix up your dough, and get ready to make a great big mess.

The first mistake you’re likely to make is a dough patty that falls apart; cracks around the edges are a telltale sign. Add more water and re-knead. Your next mistake will be putting in too much filling so it oozes out—something you’ll get better about estimating in time. In cooking, cheese is your friend in helping the pupusa stay cohesive as the cheese melts, but then it will stick to surfaces as it cools. I found a good strategy is to cook the pupusas in a skillet with tapered sides so I can slide it out when it’s done. Put it briefly on a paper towel to blot off excess oil, then transfer to a non-stick surface like a silicone mat.

Now you’re ready to eat and share, and I predict you’ll like pupusas revueltas quite a bit. Do take the time and trouble (in advance) to make curtido, the traditional cabbage slaw accompaniment. The recipe in the Curly and his Abuelita post mentioned above is excellent, though I adapted it with a bit of chile. ¡Disfrute!