World Cup Cuisine – Honduran Pupusas

So, day six of our World Cup Cuisine series and our first loss: none of the teams that we have chosen so far have lost their games, but when choosing Honduras we figured that that roll was likely to end anyway. I only had a vague inkling where Honduras was before I looked it up, so for those who don’t know, it is in Central America, with El Salvador and Guatemala bordering it to the west and Nicaragua to the east.

Our first idea was a coconut and seafood soup, but it looked complicated and also contained various vegetables that we would have been hard pressed to find, although I am certain that they could have been found somewhere in London had we looked hard enough. Then we found a recipe for pupusas, which are a something like thick, stuffed corn tortillas. They originated in neighbouring El Salvador, but are very popular in Honduras too. As we had masa harina for making tortillas and also some left over Mexican beans that we could use to stuff them, they sounded like just the thing.

We added a little more water to the masa harina than we normally do to tortillas, to make it a bit more pliable. We formed it into four balls, made a little dent inside each ball and filled two of them each with some of the beans and some left over chorizo (from last night) and a little grated cheese. Then we pressed them in our tortilla press (not quite as thin as a tortilla though or the filling would get squashed out) and dry fried them for a minute or two on each side.

Those with the beans inside them were more successful, especially if you bit into a nice cheesy bit. We made some salsa roja, to go with it, which is a cooked tomato, onion and chilli salsa with quite a lot of dried oregano in it. It was a good match to the pupusas, especially since the filling sometimes didn’t get that well distributed inside it and you ended up with half of it being mostly doughy and needing something to make it more interesting.

So a success from the point of view from making something new and interesting, but if we made them again we’d need to work on trying to get a bit more filling into them and getting it more evenly distributed inside.