DM Blog

Michelle and I have been wanting to make pupusas for quite a long time now but we don't have a food processor, which makes things very difficult. Sure, we could go out and buy a cheap food processor for $100, but the one we want (to match with our Candy Apple Red KitchenAid blender) is about $500 and spending that kind of money on kitchen equipment is just not a priority for us right now.

Anyways, the other day I was rendering down some pork fat so we could make tamales and, not wanting to waste the left over fatty meat, it occurred to me that I should try making the chicharron mixture in our blender. It did work, but I had to add a little more tomato sauce than I wanted to in order to get it to blend evenly. Even still, it wasn't bad chicharron and I knew that we'd still be able to make great pupusas with it, so I froze it for another day…

And finally this weekend we decided to buy some maseca and make pupusas. I made the cheese mixture, chicharron, curtido, tomato sauce and masa, but in terms of actually assembling the pupusas, I needed Michelle for that. This is one dish that we can only make together!

I was very impressed with Michelle – it's been a long time since she's made pupusas but you wouldn't know that from looking at them. And in terms of taste, they were easily some of the best pupusas we've ever had!

Here's some photographic proof of Michelle making the pupusas:

Earlier in the week I had made some aji de gallina to use in arroz tapado and I'm always making Peruvian-influenced dishes for Michelle, so we were joking that I make Peruvian food while she makes Salvadoran food… LOL

This reminds me of a very funny story about pupusas…

Whenever we even mention pupusas now, we can't help but think of an episode of Diners, Drive-ins and Dives (on Food Network) when the host, Guy Fieri, goes to Tortilla Cafe in Washington, DC for some authentic Salvadoran pupusas and tamales. If you've never seen the episode, you should watch this video:

Someone should have told the poor guy what the alternate/slang meaning of "pupusa" is. Maybe then he wouldn’t have said "the pupusa is loose-ah" or "…the pupusa? Enormous! All I need here is a small bed…" LOL that’s hard to forget – I’m sure it will now stick with you too!

It took me a while to find that video and it was only available in the states (and not the greatest quality) so I had to work at it to get it up on here, but I think it was worth the effort – it’s just too funny to pass up, no?