Vegan Pupusas

A longer and more detailed description

I’m going to be completely honest. I love pupusas. I’d had them before I made this, and I’ll have them again. I’d been looking forward to El Salvador specifically because I wanted to make pupusas, and you know what? I’m not disappointed. Hopefully, you’ll be just as delighted as I was.

Let’s start by making the filling. Pupusas are fairly flexible in their ability to be filled with basically anything, but I wanted squash, so we’re making ourselves some squash. Set your oven to roast, chuck in your butternut (I doused mine in chili oil first!), and leave it there for a while to turn from stubborn ornery vegetable to something delicious.

Meanwhile, make your dough. As with all dough based things we make, the dough is the tricky part. Mix your masa harina with water, stirring until it’s soft and blended.

There. Done. Painless. No sitting, no yeasting, no kneading, just mix and done. Bless you, El Salvador. Bless you.

Once the butternut is ready, heat some oil in a pan (not the chili oil unless you’re a masochist). Mix the beans and squash together and fetch your shredded cheese. You could, at this point, run the beans and squash through a blender for a few pulses, just to make them easier to work with, or you could not do that. It’s entirely up to you. I ran them through a blender, though, and can proudly report it did not make my life any easier, but it did give me more dishes to wash, so make of that what you will.

Wet your hands. Trust me on this - we’re going to be working with dough that likes to stick to hands, and it is much less inclined to stick if you set this boundary now. With damp but not dripping hands, take a spoonful of pupusa dough and roll it into a ball. It should be a nice ball that falls apart if you squish it too much. My advice is not to squish it. No, instead, we’re going to physics this baby into existence.

Toss the ball between your palms, letting it slap itself flat against your palm with each toss. After a few tosses, give it a particularly good whumph of a toss, then pat it flat against your palm with your fingertips, preferably in time with whatever music you’re listening to so you feel like an absolute kitchen god. It’s fun. Have fun with it. Once the dough is flat(ish), add your filling and…

Look. I’m going to admit something. I take the pictures I use on this blog, and I know what they look like. I know you clicked on this despite seeing that picture. I know the pictures generally look like what would happen if I threw food at a wall, then decided to plate whatever slid down. I know this picture is a travesty to the good name of pupusas.

But it’s tasty. And isn’t that what matters?

I’m not going to pretend I folded these into a proper half-moon shape, then flattened them with a spatula in the pan, even though that’s what I’m going to tell you to do. You and I both know that I got to this point, dough spattered across my walls, floor, refrigerator, and self, stared at the bit of beans, squash, and cheese in my hand, and came to the rapid realisation I had put way more in there than the amount of dough could support. You and I both know that I had a small moment of panic, crushed everything together, and tossed it into the pan, giving it a side-eye as I promised myself I’d get the next one right. Or the one after that. Or after that, until I got to the last little bit of dough and realised not one of these would look correct.

But I believe in you and your ability to correctly judge how much filling you need. I believe in your ability to fold a pupusa. I believe you can succeed where I always and inevitably fail.

Because you, you my friend, are the actual kitchen god. I’m just a pretender who likes making messes.

Fry your pupusas, whatever shape they may be. Fry them until they’re lightly browned, and do it over and over until there’s nothing left but a mess and a pile of pupusas. Serve with salsa and the knowledge that you’ve done good. Buen provecho and xitlacua cualli!

Substitutions and suggestions

For the masa harina: I had to make a special trip to a specialty grocery store to get this because of how fundamental it is to the dish. This is essentially an extra coarse version of cornmeal, but with a little tang to it. You could consider substituting it with cornmeal pulsed in a blender a couple of times and spritzed with lime juice, or with corn flour for a thicker alternative.
For the squash and beans: You are welcome to put whatever you like in your pupusas. Personally, I enjoyed the roasted squash and black beans, but again, they’re yours to do with what you like.
For the water: This is the only ingredient I hadn’t listed, so I thought I’d add it in here, just so it didn’t feel lonely.
For the curtido: Pupusas are traditionally served with a pickled cabbage side called curtido. I ended up not making it, but I highly recommend you do.

What I changed to make it vegan

These can be stuffed with anything, but are traditionally generally stuffed with meat and cheese. I went with squash instead, because squash is delicious.

What to listen to while you make this

I put on a playlist of Salvadorean music to listen to while I was cooking in an effort to find one or two bands I really liked. And you know what? I’m going with this one. It’s the perfect song for accidentally dropping a pupusa on the floor because you were dancing instead of paying attention to where you were throwing the thing.

A brief context for this dish

I’m going to confess something. There’s some debate about the origin of pupusas. The debate isn’t about the general area, to be clear, but everything else about pupusas? Who invented them, where the name comes from, what country can now claim them? That’s all very much disputed.

In making pupusas as my dish for El Salvador, I’m coming down on one side of that debate, but I’m fairly comfortable with my decision. Pupusas are the national dish of El Salvador, and even have a special day dedicated to them in El Salvador. Even if, historically, it’s not known whether they’re technically from El Salvador or Honduras, they are still unquestionably part of the fabric of this area of central America.

An attempt to make the world's largest pupusa in Olocuilta in 2015 (Photo source: Insideedition)

While we don’t know for certain, linguistic and ethnographic evidence suggests pupusas originate with the Nawat-speaking Pipil people. The Pipil migrated from central Mexico to what is now the coast of El Salvador, founding the city of Kuskatan around 1200 CE. There, Kuskatan thrived, establishing vast and elaborate trade networks with Mayan-speaking peoples to their east and Nahuatl-speaking peoples - including the Aztecs - to the west. They traded in indigo and cocoa, and built massive cities fed by corn harvested from the surrounding farms. It’s here that pupusas arose, a product of the corn that fuelled the city.

When the conquistadors arrived in the 16th centuries, Kuskatan initially became one of their allies, supplying them with military power and enslaved people from deeper in central America. However, by 1525, Kuskatan too had fallen to the Spanish.

Ruins of Kuskatan (Source: Skyscrapercity.com)

As with many of the foods we’ve discussed in this series, pupusas were, for centuries, a peasant food, confined to rural areas as a dish of necessity. The first written record of them dates back to 1585, when Friar Bernardino de Sahagún described them as “dish of cooked dough, mixed with meat and beans.” While not obviously pupusas, this description does evoke the image of pupusas and their filling.

The oldest text clearly describing pupusas dates back to 1837, when Guatemalan poet José Batres Montúfar described them as “Tortillas cost eight bucks for half a real, but they are enormous, a foot in diameter and true laborer’s pistons: they are almost never called tortillas, but rather for their accidents: a stuffed one, that is, a pupusa from San Salvador; a scrambled one, the dough ground together with the cheese; an empty one, which is the one I prefer, is the one that has nothing added.”

He’s wrong, of course, about the empty ones being better. They’re definitely better with something mixed in, but it’s still unambiguously pupusas.

A pupusa vendor in 1990 (Photo source: Linda Hess Miller via Guanacos.com)

As El Salvador and surrounding countries urbanised throughout the 1960s and 1970s, pupusas travelled with people migrating into cities, proliferating throughout the country. In the 1980s, as civil war ravaged El Salvador, pupusas travelled with the Salvadoran diaspora into the rest of the world, becoming a global phenomenon. They have become a street food staple, not only throughout central America, but throughout the United States as well, with multiple countries celebrating them with holidays and festivals. They are a symbol of El Salvador and the Salvadoran people, but more than anything, are a lasting reminder of what food represents and the endurance of cuisine beyond borders.