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Food

Pupusas, through thick and thin

By Tim Carman,April 03, 2012

Rosa Argueta prepares pupusas at La Casita Pupuseria and Market. A pupusa… (Astrid Riecken/For The…)

If any dish can play the part of humble immigrant food, it’s the pupusa, the savory masa cake from El Salvador that practically feeds the nation morning, noon and night. When unadorned and arranged on a platter like intersecting circles, pupusas look naked and vulnerable, imminently susceptible to smear campaigns from the roaming trend-seeking hordes who can’t see the simple beauty of this stuffed round.

The pupusa has many humble cousins throughout Latin America, including the gordita and the arepa, both of which are, likewise, stuffed corn-flour cakes that can feel like a sunken sand barge in your stomach if you eat too many (which is only too easy). But the pupusa is different. It aims for a kind of self-contained perfection, in which the filling is neatly encased in a thin layer of griddled masa dough, unlike either the gordita or arepa, whose meat-and-cheese guts can spill all over the plate, frustrating your efforts at the ideal bite.

Those of us who call the Washington area home are fortunate enough to be able to sample pupusas anytime we want, given that the latest Census figures show that more than 240,000 Salvadorans have settled in the region, many of them refugees from the long and bloody civil war back in the home country. These immigrants brought their food with them, of course, which means pupusas hide in plain sight all over the place.

You can find pupusas on custom-built trucks squatting next to gas stations in Silver Spring. You can find them in storefront pupuserias along 14th Street NW (the stretch not gentrified into the land of $14 cocktails, that is). You can even find them buried deep in restaurant menus, lost among a mess of “Mexican” dishes cobbled together by Salvadorans who still think they have to hedge their bets with North American diners.

But how much do any of us know about pupusas? Personally, I had been eating them for years, not always grasping the finer details of what makes one superb and another sub-par. The more I looked at the pupusa, in fact, the more questions arose. Why, for example, do most pupuserias serve essentially the same ones, like the pork-bean-cheese combo known as the “revuelta,” as if U.S.-style invention were off limits at these joints? I was also curious to know if the cakes were prepared differently in El Salvador vs. the States. And perhaps most important: Why is the “humble” pupusa so unbelievably difficult to make on your own?

Finding answers to my questions wasn’t always easy in a world where English is a second language and where my pidgin Spanish frequently results in long silences over the phone, followed by an abrupt click. Which is why I almost wanted to hug Jaime Arbaiza, general manager of the La Casita location in Silver Spring. With Jaime, I had access not only to the inner workings of a modern pupuseria but also to a man who could articulate (in English for Mr. Gringo here) the minute differences between pupusas in the United States and El Salvador.

Or at least I had access to a man who could turn to his mother and La Casita co-owner, Leonor Arbaiza, a Salvadoran native who recently visited the home country. Between them, mother and son tell me that pupusas in El Salvador tend to be about an inch smaller — at least when purchased from one of the many street vendors — and considerably thinner than the versions found here. Jaime chalks up the differences to simple economics. “Over there, they try to save as much as they can,” he says.

But in the States, where the calories come cheap and everyone always seems to want more, pupuserias tend to build their cakes bigger and fatter, sometimes to the detriment of the filling, which can be overwhelmed by the corn masa shell. That may sound like harsh criticism, but as Jaime points out, many Salvadorans simply prefer their pupusas that way. It’s almost a value equation.

La Casita opts for more balance with its pupusas, which is part of the reason why I like the place so much. Standing over a couple of serving trays dotted with pupusas, Jaime reviews the specimens, like a drill sergeant inspecting the troops. Each pupusa should have a pillowy quality, he notes, but avoid messiness. Ideally, the filling should not ooze from any cracks, although as a pupusa apologist like myself might tell you, there’s nothing at all wrong with those little circles of escaped cheese, melted and browned on the griddle.

Mostly, though, La Casita’s kitchen aims for thin, intact masa shells, so that when you order a frijol con queso (bean with cheese) or a queso con loroco (cheese with a Salvadoran flower bud whose flavor somehow smacks of green beans, asparagus and artichokes) you actually taste the filling. “To me, it’s better when you have as much masa as you need, no more than that,” says Jaime, almost Zenlike in his philosophy toward his dough.