Another Tasting

And the fall dishes keep coming. This tasting is all about two things: comfort and flavor. No boundary pushing, no fancy food, just pure flavors, simple presentations, and awesomeness of ingredients.

Chowder/Lentil Shoots/Scallop/Black Truffle Beurre Blanc

Duck Confit Pupusa/Orange Salad

Crispy Cavolo Nero/Grits/Quail Stuffed with Cannellini, Smoked Sausage, and Sage/Cacciatore Sauce

Corn-Thyme Crème Caramel/Pickled Figs/Duck Breast/Tiny Green Beans/Tasmanian Pepper Syrup

Orange Polenta Upside Down Cake/Coconut Sorbet/Crème Anglaise

Alien Ingredient #14: Choclo

There are many brands of the large kerneled South American corn called choclo in the freezer case over at the market, both on the cob (entero) and off (en grano). I chose a bag that to my eye was the best looking, with the most uniform, least blemished kernels.

You can see that by American standards, the kernels are huge. I ate a kernel right out of the bag, still semifrozen. It tastes like corn, albeit with a slightly thicker pericarp (skin) and a starchier interior.

By any other name, it is still corn and can be used in any corn application. The perfect application for me is soup and this bag ended up in a soup with black beans and hominy (mote blanco).

Vote: nothing much to write home about: it's just corn.

Alien Ingredient #11: Cancha/Maíz Chulpe

In reading through my books on South American cooking, I had noted that a type of toasted dried corn called cancha is often served in Peru as a table snack and as a crunchy topping for seviche, but I had never seen any in the bodegas around here until recently. Cancha is made from a type of corn that is generally called maíz chulpe, though in this case it is labeled maíz montaña.

Armed and dangerous with this information, I set about toasting the dried corn kernels in a little oil in an open skillet. Mistake. Like popcorn, cancha go kaboom! Put a lid on yours! After toasting, sprinkle well with sea salt and enjoy! You'll find that it is a little spongy in the middle just like popcorn but a good bit starchier. You'll also find that it has great corn flavor.

Vote: addictive!

Pork Confit Summer Posole

Here's a decidedly non-traditional posole that I just made for dinner to use up some leftover pork confit and some fresh corn. Tradition or no, it is delicious.


1 cup duck fat from pork confit
3 large poblano chiles, diced
2 large onions, diced
4 ears corn, shaved, cobs reserved
1/4 cup minced garlic
stems from one bunch cilantro, finely minced
2 tablespoons ground cumin
1 tablespoon dried oregano
2 bay leaves
1/4 cup ancho chile paste
16 ounces pork confit
1 #10 can hominy
1-1/2 gallons pork stock

Heat the duck fat in a large soup pan (to hold 2-1/2 gallons soup) and add the chiles, onions, corn, corn cobs, garlic, cilantro, cumin, oregano, and bay leaves. Cook over high heat, stirring as necessary, until the onions become translucent. Add the chile paste and stir well. Add the pork confit, hominy, and pork stock. Bring to a simmer and simmer until the vegetables are tender, approximately 30 to 45 minutes. Season to taste. This recipe does not call for salt because pork confit is salty in its own right.

Remove the bay leaves and corn cobs from the soup and discard them. The corn cobs add both flavor and a touch of corn starch to the soup. The starch adds a hint of body.

I like to serve a garnish plate with my posole: fresh cilantro, lime wedges, finely diced white onion, dried oregano, and crushed red pepper flakes.

Pork Confit

This is the classic French curing and preserving technique traditionally used for goose and duck, extended to pork shoulder. The results are so worth the effort.

Two large pork shoulders, about 15 pounds, cut in 3" cubes.
2 cups kosher salt
1 tablespoon ground juniper berries
2 ounces fresh thyme branches
2-3 gallons duck fat, as necessary

In a large non-reactive pan, rub the pork cubes with the salt, juniper, and thyme. Cover and refrigerate for 48 hours. Remove, rinse off the salt and thyme, and drain well. Place in a large braising pan. Melt the duck fat and pour enough over the pork to cover. Place in a slow (200-250F) oven and cook until meltingly tender, 8-12 hours. Remove pork from duck fat and place on sheet trays and chill rapidly. Place the chilled pork in a large metal storage container and pour the reserved duck fat over to seal the pork entirely. Refrigerate.

While pork confit can be used immediately, it is better after it ages for a few weeks. To use, place the metal container on a broiler or in the oven to melt the fat. Remove the amount of confit necessary. Let the fat resolidify over the remaining confit. Add more duck fat if necessary to cover.

Craziness, Redux

I last posted about the semi-lunacy of taking in bushels and bushels of local produce and lots of local meats and in under 48 hours, concocting a menu using all those ingredients and serving it to 60+ people (see "Craziness"). It's not really as crazy an endeavor as it sounds: it is in larger scale what we do every day here at the restaurant—react to the fresh, local products coming in the door to create the dinner menu for the day.

Before I get started, I have to give a big thanks to the ladies from Preserve Frederick for all their help in coordinating logistics: amazing job! And both the front of the house crew and back of the house crew did fantastic jobs, letting me move from the kitchen to the dining room at will and greet and mingle with our guests. Great job everyone! Service was amazingly smooth!

To recap, last evening we held a sold-out farm-to-table dinner for the benefit of Preserve Frederick in conjunction with the Piedmont Environmental Council. The net proceeds will go to Preserve Frederick for the publication of next year's edition of the Buy Fresh-Buy Local guide, that connects local producers and consumers of agricultural products.

From the restaurant perspective, I've been leading the fresh-local parade for the past seven years and I am happy to have been able to help raise funds to publish a guide that might help our local producers connect with other restaurants and the general public. Who knows? Maybe we can convince other restaurants to keep their money here in our local economy.

After triaging all the food that came in the door, the cooks and I started sketching out ideas for using the products and dealing with issues such as feeding 60+ people with 7 pounds of pork. Here's the final menu that we ended up with after receiving the final donations at around 2:30pm before the dinner:

Gazpacho with Crispy Squash Cake

Gratin of Natural Chicken in Mustard Sauce

Thai Beef Salad

Puerco con Mojo on Corn Cake with Tomato, Tomatillo, and Groundcherry Salsa

Irish Stew with Butternut Squash Purée

White Chocolate, Pecan, and Roasted Apple Bread Pudding with Crème Anglaise

Gazpacho with Crispy Squash Cake. We made a fairly traditional tomato gazpacho with lots of diced vegetables for garnish, including yellow, red and green peppers, beets, and corn. If the beets are very young and sweet, you can use a lot; if they are very earthy, they will dominate. These were very earthy so we had to use restraint. We flavored the soup with lots of sherry vinegar and a healthy dose of Tabasco.

With the soup, we served one of our famous squash cakes: yellow squash grated and cooked for three hours in heavy cream with garlic and basil and bound with pecorino romano and bread crumbs, chilled, formed into cakes, and fried.

Gratin of Natural Chicken in Mustard Sauce. Needing to feed 60 people from 5 chickens (albeit huge ones), we had to take the chicken off the bone and stretch it. We poached the huge Corn Rock Cross chickens; poached a traditional mirepoix of leeks, carrots, and celery in the chicken stock to further flavor it; then reduced the stock with heavy cream and added a final liaison of Dijon mustard. After mixing the chicken, vegetables, and sauce, we baked it under an herbed breadcrumb crust. This is one of the key tricks of the professional kitchen: cook everything separately to the point where it is perfectly cooked and then combine all the ingredients. I wouldn't expect home cooks to do this (and dirty that many pans) but this is how we get our chicken perfectly tender and our vegetables just done.

Thai Beef Salad. What to do with chuck and sirloin steaks and how to stretch a small amount for a crowd? With chuck, you either have to cook it a little or a lot. We went for a little, first marinating the beef in a touch of the salad dressing, then grilling it to medium rare, chilling it, then slicing it and removing the nasty bits. This we mixed with a julienne of carrots, sliced green onions, mounds of Thai basil, cilantro, a few cherry tomatoes and lots of dressing. The dressing is lime juice, brown sugar, kaffir lime, fish sauce, and local first-pressing canola oil. We served this over some impeccable baby greens that were picked just before the dinner. Kaffir lime is not typical in this salad, but I have a lot on hand that I need to use.

Puerco con Mojo on Corn Cake with Tomato, Tomatillo, and Groundcherry Salsa. We had only 7 pounds of shoulder, bone-in at that, to feed a crowd, so we knew we were going to braise the pork and pull it. We braised the pork in a classic Cuban mojo of sour orange juice, cilantro, oregano, garlic, and cumin, then shredded it and mixed it with a Cuban-style arroz verde (green rice) and a salsa of cherry tomatoes, peppers, local tomatillos, and local groundcherries.

We shaved a lot of fresh corn, just picked in the afternoon, mixed it with local poblanos (these were way spicy!), garlic, and Virginia cornmeal from which we made delicious little pancakes on which to serve the pork.

Irish Stew with Butternut Squash Purée. I cubed four legs of lamb and stewed them in Petit Verdot from Jefferson Cellars as the base for this "stew." It was non-traditional in that while I did stew the lamb, I sautéed the accompanying carrots, celery, and onions, and roasted local Yukon Gold and Kennebec potatoes with rosemary. After straining and reducing the lamb stock, I bound it with a classic beurre manié, and mixed it into the meat and vegetables just before service.

For the butternut purée we peeled, cubed, and roasted the first butternut squash of the season. We then mashed them and seasoned with a touch of butter, nutmeg, salt, and white pepper. Roasting small cubes of squash to the point of slight caramelization yields a depth of flavor that you cannot get by other means.

White Chocolate, Pecan, and Roasted Apple Bread Pudding with Crème Anglaise. I think that everyone who ate this bread pudding will all agree that it was the best that I have ever made; it was pure money! The key is using premium products: our fantastic baguettes, local Jonagold and Empire apples roasted with cinnamon and local honey, white chocolate, toasted pecan halves, a little (about two gallons) 40+% heavy cream, a couple vanilla beans, and dozens of local Rhode Island Red eggs. Besides using the best quality ingredients possible, the other trick with bread pudding is knowing when to take it out of the oven. If you let it set up totally in the oven, it's overcooked, still good, but not money!

Thanks to the following farmers for their kind support of this event:

Echo Ridge Farm
Freight Station Farmers Market
Hardin Natural Chicken
Hedgebrook Farm
Linda's Mercantile
Marker-Miller Orchards
North Branch Farm
Richard's Fruit Market
Virginia Lamb

An Eclectic Menu

On Saturday night, we did another of my tasting menus to celebrate a 60th birthday. I really enjoyed creating and executing this menu. Unlike some menus, it came together in about five minutes and I was off to the races. The customers requested something Moroccan and something Indian, which helped guide a couple of the choices. This post is not going to be short. I am trying to record some of my thoughts here for my own reference in the future. I think my cooking is getting much more refined, a bit more cerebral, and hopefully, more playful too.

Pennsylvania Dutch Dried Corn and Virginia Slab Bacon Soup. I've been playing with textures in food a lot more in the last six months or so and I wanted this dish to be a play on the textures of corn. Cope's Dried Sweet Corn is a product of nearby Lancaster County, PA and something that I have been experimenting with of late. It is sweet corn that is picked while still young and tender and then dried. The interesting thing about it is that it is equally good reconstituted or dried.

I wanted this dish to set the tone for the evening: at once comforting, playful, thought provoking, and interactive. The soup is classic Southern "fried corn" in flavor, comfort food par excellence. Fried corn in my family is when you render several strips of bacon and then slice fresh sweet corn into the bacon fat and cook it until it thickens, like creamed corn.

I laid out the garnishes along the plate, from the cup to the edge of the plate—smoked duck, chives, dried corn, duck cracklings (duck skin and fat rendered to crispy, crunchy awesomeness). Rather than garnish the soup directly myself, I left that to my guests for two reasons. First, there is no way to manipulate the garnishes without using your fingers. I wanted my guests to interact with the food, which should have a tactile component as well as the more usual components. I hoped that using their fingers would set the customers at ease and set the tone that while the food is serious, it should be seriously fun. And second, I hoped that the customers would experiment with the different flavor combinations and textures. And they did. The cracklings were a huge hit.

I paired this with a Virginia Viognier, an excellent pairing. I'm going to say this again for everyone to hear: we make the best Viognier in the world here in Virginia.

Crispy Fried Oyster. This dish is a play on the oyster theme, combining salsify (also called Oyster Plant) and oysters. I wanted to see if pairing them would be harmonious and more than the sum of their individual contributions. I poached the salsify and then set it in an aspic of Sauvignon Blanc and oyster liquor. You can see the salsify terrine better by following the salsify link just above.

I topped the terrine with a large fried oyster and a touch of micro-celery for flavor contrast. I set up a deliberate temperature contrast between the hot oyster and the cold terrine. The pairing went well enough, especially when served with a glass of the same Sauvignon Blanc as in the gelée, but I don't think it was memorable enough to repeat. The effect was kind of white-on-white, technically interesting, visually appealing, and tasty enough, but perhaps too subtle.

Huevos Rancheros. This is a dish that I really liked on a lot of levels. Huevos Rancheros is a dish that many of us know and love: a fried egg and salsa on top of tortillas. I really like to reimagine classic dishes with the same classic flavors, but with different forms and textures. Sometimes I want you to really think about what you're eating and what role flavor, temperature, and texture play in your perception of a dish.

The first thing I thought about was the tortilla. Gringos have a predominant preference for wheat flour tortillas rather than the classic corn masa tortillas that the dish is usually served on. I decided to play on this by using the form of wheat that we most often treat as corn: semolina. What do we mostly do with semolina, if we're not making pasta? Boil it up into a mush like polenta—think gnocchi di semolina or Cream of Wheat, which if thick enough resembles masa. And the pasta yellow color doesn't hurt in the trompe l'oeil effect either. So, I cooked the semolina fairly thick, spread it in a thin layer, let it set up, cut rounds out, and toasted them in a dry pan just like cooking tortillas on a comal.

Next: the egg. The small size of the dish required a quail egg, which I decided to poach rather than fry. I'm not a fan of crispy edges on eggs (maybe you are, but my mother made me eat them every day for years and now that I'm an adult, I will be damned if I eat another or inflict them on my customers. Mom, I love you, but no more eggs!).

Once I had the poached quail egg in mind, the thought of that runny, thinly encapsulated yolk got me thinking that I should mimic it with the salsa. So into the blender and a bit of reverse spherification magic and voilà, spherical salsa marinated in chorizo oil. I had to use just a touch of xanthan gum on the salsa to get it to mimic the texture of the egg yolk; it was just a wee bit too watery otherwise. A bit of rendered chorizo and a splash of pimentón sauce completes the dish.

The only thing that bothers me about this dish is the olive color of the salsa. In blending the salsa, the green cilantro, green onion, and green chile mixed with the red tomato to make a nice ripe olive color. But the cilantro and chile were critical to the flavor. Maybe I can figure out how to extract the cilantro and chile flavors some day and end up with a tomato-colored salsa.

Note to those who would follow after me: you must reduce the quantity of onion significantly. My first attempt was a standard salsa whose flavor when blended was dominated by onion to the point where it became inedible. Crushing the onion in the blender turns it into a beast. Use 75% less onion than you would for a standard chopped salsa and lay way off the garlic.

I paired this with a light Sicilian Sangiovese.

Deconstruction of Bestilla. I just happened to see Mario do a version of bestilla on Iron Chef last weekend and I was thinking as I was watching that I could do it better. And when my customer asked for a Moroccan dish in the tasting, I had my chance.

Let me apologize for the crappy photo. Things were mightily hectic on the line when I took this and I got bumped every time that I took a picture. This is the only one that is halfway acceptable; none of the good low-angle shots came out. You try handholding a camera with a macro lens, flash off, stopped way down because of crappy lighting, on a screamingly busy restaurant line and see what your results are!

I wanted to play with people's notions of what constitutes a sweet course and what constitutes a savory course and Arab-inspired cuisine is wonderful at blending savory and sweet.

There is nothing unusual in the traditional chicken (I just couldn't get pigeons for this tasting) tagine that serves as the basis for my bestilla. But, rather than encasing the traditional filling in pastry, I decided to do a napoleon of layers of pastry and fillings. This would emphasize the crackle and crunch of the pastry that would otherwise be dulled by the steam from the filling.

In making the pastry, I layered pastry sheets with cinnamon and sugar and cooked them in the oven to the point of dark caramelization to give a bitterness to play against the sweetness of the chicken. I am already wondering what effect cocoa powder between the pastry layers would have. I sprinkled the pastry liberally with cinnamon and powdered sugar before assembling the napoleon.

The bottom layer of the napoleon is spinach sautéed with golden raisins, almonds, and red onions that were marinated in vinegar and sugar. The center layer is the traditional pulled chicken. The top is finished with the highly reduced sauce bound with eggs. I wanted a custardy effect rather than a scrambled egg effect so the eggs were whisked rapidly in the manner of classic oeufs brouillés.

I set a fruity Marlborough Pinot Noir against all the spices and flavors and it worked quite well.

Punjabi Lamb Kebab. There is nothing new or creative in this dish; it is quite simply classic Punjabi cuisine in the miniature. I marinated some shoulder of local lamb in my special lamb masala, garlic, ginger, and yoghurt for 24 hours, then grilled it. Lacking a tandoor, I grilled the miniature naan. The garnishes—raita, dhania chatni (cilantro/coriander chutney), and dal makhani (urad dal with grated tomatoes and special saunf masala)—are all typical. Nothing novel here, just solid good eats.

I chose a big Nero d’Avola from Sicily to stand up to the big flavors in this dish.

Hibiscus Crème Caramel. Sometimes I think that pastry chefs get carried away and lose sight of the tried and true desserts such as crème caramel whose silky custard is such a classic comfort food.

I brewed a tea of hibiscus flowers and loose black (Keemun Panda) tea with some dried cranberries to amplify the red color. Then I added sugar and cooked the tea into a syrup which you see garnishing the plate. The cream base, I steeped with more hibiscus flowers, and the baked custard, I topped with a candied hibiscus flower.

This was paired with a gorgeous pink Crémant d’Alsace, whose color echoed the hibiscus and whose strawberry, cranberry, and rhubarb flavors meshed elegantly with the matching hibiscus flavors—a perfect pairing in my book.

Seven Textures of Chocolate. And now just after I said that sometimes pastry chefs get carried away, here I go getting carried away on a chocolate fantasy. You should know that I am not motivated in the least by chocolate and pastry is not my thing, although I have a pretty deft hand at it. By choice, I don't eat sweets, so it is profoundly strange that I should labor so much over a single sweet composition, which you see here at low-angle running down the plating table.

You can see from left to right a three-chocolate mousse, three different chocolate bonbons, a streak of ganache paint, a straw of tempered dark chocolate resting on a cube of my sinfully rich and decadent Bête Noir, a quenelle of my quick fudge, and finally, an espresso cup of banging Mexican hot chocolate. I included the hot chocolate to help tease the chocolate-jaded palate back to life with a big hit of pasilla chile.

Can I just say in passing that I hate working with white chocolate? My hat is off to those of you who have the patience to work with it.

I paired this with a straightforward ruby Port, but a delicious local raspberry Merlot or a huge Amarone would have worked equally well, if not better.

Hominy

Tonight, we ran Rack of Venison on the menu with a Hominy-Poblano Gratin and Mole Sauce. As we were plating the venison, I really started thinking about how much I love hominy and I ran to my office to grab my camera to record the plate presentation for posterity. Too bad the pictures looked like hell, all underexposed. Sigh, I still have way too much to learn about photography.

I wonder, is mine the only gringo restaurant to serve hominy?

As a kid, one of my very favorite foods was hominy and it remains so today. Until recently, I have not featured it on the menu at the restaurant because I hadn’t been able to find a good supply. That has changed as our local Latino community expands by leaps and bounds.

Growing up, I thought that hominy was a product of our local Scots-Irish Appalachian culture: it was rare, but not unheard of, to see a lye hopper outside a mountain cabin. Hominy is dried corn kernels soaked in a basic solution such as lye until the hard outer hull and germ come off the kernels. The kernels are rinsed thoroughly and cooked until soft. It was a do-it-yourself, poor man’s Appalachian foodstuff, or so I thought until I moved to Texas in my early 20s.

Once in Texas, partly because I was flat broke and partly because I love simple food, I discovered as many back-alley taquerias and bodegas as possible. Many was the morning that I would start my day at the local taqueria where Abuelita Gomez would always make sure that there were an extra two or three tortillas in my docena (dozen). Sometimes, when I had the money, I would eat dinner at one of these joints, sitting among the Mexican laborers and listening to, but not comprehending, their chatter. It was there that I discovered both menudo and posole, two of my favorite foods to this day. Subsequent trips to Sandia National Labs (don't ask; I can't tell) in Albuquerque showed me yet another form of posole, one that we celebrated in a past beer dinner.

Menudo is tripe soup, the traditional Northern Mexican hangover food. Although hominy in menudo is optional, it is the sine qua non of posole, a pork, red chile, and hominy stew of Sonoran origin. Posole is sometimes spelled pozole. Eating these two dishes caused me to realize that perhaps hominy was a lot more widespread than I grew up understanding.

As I started to research corn and corn products in Mexico, one resource was a very wonderful set of regional cookbooks put out by the Mexican government and written by very well-educated authors. Occasionally I would come across the phrase maíz nixtamalado. You recognize the tamal root, especially in its plural form tamales. Because I don’t speak Spanish, it took me a long time to understand that they were talking about hominy, which if dried and ground fine enough makes the masa dough from which we make both tortillas and tamales. I finally clued in that nixtamal means hominy.

The word nixtamal is clearly not of Spanish origin. Rather, it’s an indigenous term, telling me that hominy is an ancient food. And in fact, it is. Researchers have determined that peoples in Mesoamerica have been making hominy for around 10,000 years. Back to our Appalachian settlers: they learned about corn and how to make hominy from the local peoples: hominy is an Algonquin word.

Now I come to find out that we have also assimilated the word nixtamal into English: nixtamalization is the process of making hominy from dried corn kernels. (Who knew there were cereal scientists that studied such things?) While our early settlers used lye (sodium hydroxide), derived from soaking wood ashes in water, Mexicans used lime-water (calcium hydroxide) to the same effect. This process also converts some of the B vitamins in corn to a form that can be more readily absorbed by the body. So, not only is hominy more flavorful and easier to eat than dried corn, it’s healthier too.

Once the husk and the germ of the corn kernel are gone, the remainder is cooked until tender. The grains of hominy fluff out a bit, reminding me of solid popcorn. Of course, hominy can be white, blue, yellow, or pinkish, depending on the color of corn used. Once soft, hominy is canned or dried. Dried hominy, often called posole in the Sonoran desert (part of both the US and Mexico: cuisine knows no political boundaries), can either be cooked to soften it or ground. Ground hominy is called, in increasing levels of fineness, coarse grits, grits, and masa harina (or corn flour).

Finding hominy at retail has been challenging until recently. In the mercados and bodegas, the challenge is language. I would wager that the majority of Latinos have never heard of hominy by any name. Those that have call it variously: posole, mote (as in mote blanco), maíz en estilo mexicano, and by other names. Some American grocery stores carry American brands such as Bush’s (acceptable) and Manning’s (not so good) and sometimes the pan-Latino Goya brand (good but expensive). Now, Wal-Mart has started carrying the excellent Juanita’s brand in their Latino section (in the aisle labeled, ignorantly, Mexican). It even comes in restaurant-sized #10 cans (108 oz.), which makes me happy. And, now my specialty goods supplier sells me cases (six cans) of #10 cans, which makes me happier still.

The simplest way to cook hominy is to sauté it in bacon grease, with salt and liberal quantities of black pepper. This to me is outstanding breakfast food, but we use it in the restaurant as a base for ossobuco of pork as well. I also love to use hominy in a mix I’ve started calling sofrito: poblanos, onions, plátanos or hominy, cumin, garlic, green onions, tomatoes, cilantro, all fried in achiote oil, with some chiffonaded collards thrown in at the last minute. This makes an outstanding accompaniment to pan-Caribbean cooking, and it wasn’t terrible when we served sliced, grilled bison ribeye over it recently, as many customers will attest. And of course, hominy is de rigueur in any pork-based, red chile stew.

Pupusas

Around one o'clock this afternoon, I was sitting around working on another sudoku when I realized that I was starving. My wife suggested going to Sweet Sunset Bakery, which was fine by me because they make great pupusas (on Saturday and Sunday only) and I hadn't visited with César Yong, baker extraordinaire, partner and frontman, in a long time.

A pupusa is essentially a filled tortilla, made by flattening a ball of masa into a disk, placing some stuffing in the middle of the disk, folding it over on itself, and patting it back out into a thick disk with outer layers of masa sandwiching the filling. Or, if you're a beginner like me, you flatten two balls of masa into tortillas, place the filling in between, and crimp the edges. This is strictly a déclassé method and not one to brag on in public.

Watching an experienced cook make pupusas is a fascinating experience, one that I first encountered at the Peruvian restaurant Pollos Inka in Herndon in the early 1990s. It only takes one try at patting out balls of masa into tortillas to fully appreciate the skill required. Many was the morning that I would bicycle over to the local taqueria (called imaginatively enough La Taqueria) when I lived in Texas, surely to eat, but I think also to marvel at the dexterity of Abuela Hernández as she made tortilla after tortilla in a rhythmic, almost trancelike state.

As an aside, she always took good care of me, probably because I was a young kid, the only gringo in the joint, and obviously fascinated by her skill. My dozen tortillas cost a dollar and rarely were there fewer than 14 in the wrapper. And there was always a big chunk of bacon in my frijoles alla charra for lunch.

Some ten years later, after my first initiation to pupusas at a Peruvian restaurant, I mistakenly thought for years that the dish was one of Peruvian invention. While I was researching the history of Venezuelan arepas (a quasi-gordita that that has been split and filled after cooking, ham biscuit style), I discovered that while Nicaraguans, Colombians, and Peruvians all make varying styles of pupusas, pupusas are perhaps the defining dish of Salvadorean cuisine.

Pupusas, after being cooked on the comal like a tortilla, are served with a mild white cabbage slaw called curtido (almost a fresh sauerkraut sans the salt) and a thin tomato sauce. Pupusas are not knife and fork material—dig in with your fingers.

Although pupusas can be stuffed with just about any filling, the most traditional are queso, frijoles, chicharrón (pork rind/skin/bacon), revuelta (a mix of everything), and my favorite, loroco y queso. Loroco is the bud of a Central American vine and reminds me a bit of broccoli in flavor.

And by the way, César and his partner are great bakers. To give credit where it is due however, I've seen César's wife Isabel in the back making the pupusas.

Sweet Sunset Bakery
37 W. Jubal Early Drive
Winchester, VA 22601
540-535-0020
sweetsunsetbakery@verizon.net