January 7th, 2008
Bonus post: Pepian Recipe
Greetings from Lake Atitlan, where I currently am staying in a lovely and small village called San Marcos. I´ll fill in some travel blanks soon, but for the meantime wanted to post the recipe for Pepian, a food I´ve mentioned a few times on the blog, and pictured in the photo album below.
(Recipe as recorded by my friend James)
You need:
- a cup or so of sesame seeds
- a cup or so of pepitorias; these look like greenish pumpkin seeds,but my Guatemalan friends assure me that they are not pumpkin seeds. However, according to a brief Google search, they are in fact pumpkin seeds. So I have no idea what they really are but pumpkin seeds wouldprobably work fine.
- 4 or 5 plum tomatoes
- a cup and a half of miltomates aka tomatillos
- a pound of green beans, de-stemmed
- a couple of big carrots, peeled
- 2 pounds of rice
- a couple of small pieces of cinnamon (something like three or four pieces, each roughly 1 cm by 3 cm)
- two kinds of dried chile: chile pasa, a black chile that looks like a raisin (thus the name) and chile guaque. You need a small piece of each type of chile, something like a 3 cm slice of each.
- cumin
- black pepper
- a loaf of bread
- some kind of broth; we did it with chicken broth on one night and beef broth on another night, but it would also work with vegetarian broth.
Cooking Instructions
- Toast the sesame seeds until they’re golden
- Toast the pepitorias until they’re golden
- Toast the entire loaf of bread.
- In a dry saucepan, heat the tomatillos until they’re somewhat soft and blackened, but not so much that they lose their shape.
- In a dry saucepan, heat two of the plum tomatoes, the cinnamon, and the chiles. You should cut the chiles and the cinnamon up into smaller pieces so they cook better. This step takes a long time and you will think you’re burning the chiles, as they’ll give off a toxic smoke. Don’t worry; they’ll be done when they’re completely blackened and look like they’re charcoal. The cinnamon should be somewhat blackened and the tomatoes somewhat blackened (but, again, it shouldn’t lose its shape).
- Mix all of the above except the bread, plus the black pepper and cumin. Blend a cup at a time in a blender, adding water or broth as needed to help it blend. After blending each batch, strain it into a pot using a sieve. Use extra water or broth to extract more of the sauce from the stuff in the sieve. You’ll need to scrape the sieve with a spoon to make sure all the sauce gets through. When it’s all strained, you should have a sort of sandy mush in the sieve and asmooth, nutty sauce in the pot. Discard the sandy mush part.
- Mash the toasted loaf of bread with enough broth to make it into mush, but not a liquidy mush. Blend the bread mush, put it in the pot, and stir it well. This is the pepian sauce. Let it simmer for a while, stirring occasionally.
- (This can be done in parallel.) Chop the green beans, carrots, and the remaining tomatoes. Put them in a large pot with some oil and heat over a high flame. When they’re cooked, throw in the rice (yes, that’s dry rice) and stir constantly. After several minutes the rice should become golden brown. Add an appropriate quantity of water and a good amount of salt, cover the pot and allow it to simmer until the rice has absorbed all the water.
- I served it with an additional salsa of chiles, garlic, onion, lime, cilantro, and salt; I think it adds a welcome kick.
Paul from REI says:
Hey Josh! Happy new year and xmas, and awesome recipe. Nice site man, and glad things are well in your travels!
January 9th, 2008 at 2:56 am