Panuchos were the inspiration for the Ukrainian perogy, but they never did get it right. They use some pastey gringo kind of wheat flour, and make them way too small, sometimes don't even put meat in them!, then boil them first before frying [hey, they're Ukrainian] and then, it is said, often use vegetable oil instead of good old lard.
To make a panucho verdadero you first make tortillas verdaderas, tortillas de maís, made by hand from masa freshly ground from maís either fresh or dried. Grind a little yucca into the masa if you can get it, it augments stickiness. Ok, let's say you've already educated yourself in the Art Of Living Well and have tortillas on hand -
Just make a mixture of some kind of meat and vegetables and spices and maybe rice to taste, plop a wad on one side of the tortilla, fold the tortilla and kind of crimp the edges so the goop doesn't fall out, then flip it into a previously heated sartén of quality pork fat until it is dorado [goldened]. Then you eat it.
To eat it, you bite off a corner of the semicircle, opening up a big hole which you fill with salsa mexicana, which you made previously by chopping fresh jítomate, cebolla [onion], cilantro, and chiles to taste and then marinated it in salted jugo de limón for the twenty minutes it took you to make the panuchos.
A little Q&A ditty from the cattle country of the inland Southeast -
"¿Me quieres mucho?"
"¡Más que un panucho!"
That's a lot. |
