Buñuelos

Depending on where you are in Latin America the term buñuelos
can mean different things. In Central America they are balls of dough,
sometimes filled with cheese, then fried. In most of Mexico, if you ask
for a buñuelo, you are going to get a very thin piece of fried dough,
either dipped in a syrup made from piloncillo, or sprinkled with
cinnamon sugar. The latter variety are the ones I grew up on.

If you've never had one, a buñuelo is a paper thin, extremely fragile,
wafer of fried dough, cinnamony and delicious. They are best eaten
either over a sink or outdoors because when you bite into them, they
have a tendency to shatter, sending a shower of cinnamon, sugar, and
crumbs all over the floor. They melt in your mouth nearly as quickly as
cotton candy. They are very light. As a joke, I have considered sending
the recipe in to Cooking Light magazine as a healthy alternative to
funnel cakes.

My family used to make these every year during Christmas. It's a bit of a
project...very labor intensive, so it helps to have a lot of people
around to pitch in. The tradition sort of died out after most of my
siblings went off to college. About a dozen years ago, my sister Diana
got together with her friends Bob and Lise Burson, and started the
tradition back up. Now every year on Christmas eve, a group of us
convene at the Burson's house, roll up are sleeves and get to work.

The dough for buñuelos is quite similar to a dough for flour tortillas, but
instead of plain water, you use a tea made from water that is steeped
with a cinnamon stick and some anise seeds for about 30 minutes. I've
misplaced the recipe, but I will post it in a day or two. Once the
dough is made it needs to rest for an hour or so, then it's rolled into
roughly ping pong sized balls. Then the assembly line needs to get to
work. A round or two of mimosas will motivate them and make the time
fly by.

You really need a crew of at least four to get the job done, but seven or eight is ideal.

The positions are as follows:

Roller - this persons job is to roll the small balls of dough into relatively
round, paper thin disks. We have found it works best to have a group of
three or four people rolling out dough, as this is the most time
consuming part.

These disks of dough are then passed to the...



Stretcher - this person takes the already very thin dough, and stretches it even
thinner. In the end, the dough should be thin enough to read a
newspaper through. A granite counter top works great. You just lay down
the pastry, then lift an edge, stretch it out a bit, and lay it down
again, so it sort of sticks to the granite. Repeat working your way
around the dough, stretching it until it is impossibly thin. Sort of
like a strudel pastry.  

Once the dough is stretched, it's passed to the...

Frier - who as the name implies, fries the dough, flipping it once. This takes about 20 seconds per side tops.  

Once the dough is crispy, it's set aside on newspapers to drain, then is picked up by the...

Duster
- who very gingerly sets the buñuelo into a large roasting pan filled
with copious amounts of cinnamon sugar, then spoons sugar over the top.
The finished buñuelos are set aside in a safe spot. We have found
sturdy cardboard boxes work very well. You can stack them up 10 or 12
high with no problem. They are so light the bottom ones won't get
crushed. Just make sure your sister doesn't trip and fall on the box
instantly converting two hours of work into crumbs (yes this happened
once about 20 years ago).

One batch of dough makes a good four dozen eight inch buñuelos. In terms of
storage, you do can just keep them in the box. They will disappear
before they have time to go stale.

Salvage Operation

We had a hard freeze in Austin last weekend.  It was 24 degrees outside my house on Saturday morning.  I had moved all my potted plants to safety, but we did have tomato plants in the ground and they weren't so lucky.  When I went out to assess the damages, I found two big green tomatoes on one of the plants.  I didn't realize those were out there, and now they appeared to be frozen solid.  I went ahead and picked them and took them inside, figuring I'd end up throwing them away.

By mid afternoon those tomatoes had thawed, and to my surprise, they didn't turn to mush.  In fact cutting one open revealed that it was actually in pretty decent shape.  From what I could tell, only the outer 1/2 inch or so of flesh had really frozen, and even it was fine, perhaps a bit softer than the rest of the fruit.  I decided to try to make some sort of a preserve from the tomato.  I found an interesting recipe for tomato jam.  It called for several pounds of green tomatoes, but I was able to adjust the recipe down.

I diced the tomatoes, weighed them, then added an equal amount by weight, of sugar.  To that I added lemon zest, lemon juice, and half a stick of cinnamon.  I allowed the mixture to sit for a while to draw the juice out of the fruit, then cooked it over medium high heat until the fruit had turned translucent, and the mixture thickened.  I ended up taking the mixture a bit too far (probably to the soft ball stage), and I could see that if I had allowed it to cool, I would have wound up with a jar of green tomato taffy.  That might have been an interesting new confection, but it wasn't really what I was going for.   I could have cooked it some more to try to make green tomato Jolly Ranchers, but instead I added another several tablespoons of lemon juice to thin it out and hoped for the best.

Once it cooled, it ended up a bit stiffer than I'd like, but not unreasonably so, it looks beautiful, and the flavor is great.  It goes great on a thin cracker with a bit of goat cheese.  Yummy.   Next time I find myself with an abundance of green tomatoes, I may have to make a bigger batch of this to give out as gifts.