Puerto Rican · Main
Pasteles de Masa
- Advanced
- 1 h 30 m
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with a sweet edge rounding the corners, a briny, maritime salinity.
Ingredients
- 800 g pork shoulder, in 1.5 cm dice
- 150 g sofrito
- 120 ml tomato sauce
- 60 g alcaparrado (green olives with capers)
- 100 g cooked chickpeas
- 40 g raisins
- 1.2 kg green bananas (guineos verdes), peeled
- 500 g green plantains, peeled
- 300 g yautía (malanga), peeled
- 250 g calabaza (West Indian pumpkin), peeled
- 180 ml achiote oil, plus more for the leaves
- 120 ml warm milk
- 20 g fine salt
- 1 kg banana leaves, cut in 30 cm squares
- parchment paper, cut in 30 cm squares
- kitchen string
Equipment
Parchment · Grater / zester
The skills inside
Frying the paste until the oil splitsSalted water & the float testKnife cuts: dice, julienne, bias
Allergen screen
Found: dairy
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Stew the pork with the sofrito, tomato sauce, alcaparrado, chickpeas and raisins in a covered pot until the meat gives under a spoon and the sauce clings rather than runs, about 1 hour. Cool it completely or it melts the masa. 60 min
- Grate the bananas, plantains, yautía and calabaza on the fine side of a box grater, then beat in the achiote oil, milk and salt until the masa is marigold orange and drops from the spoon in a soft ribbon.
- Pass each banana leaf over a flame or across a dry hot pan until it darkens, turns glossy and folds without cracking, then brush it with achiote oil and lay it on a parchment square.
- Spread 100 g masa into a 12 cm oval on the leaf, spoon filling down the centre, fold the leaf over itself lengthwise twice, then fold both ends underneath and back the parcel with the parchment.
- Tie pairs face to face with string and boil in heavily salted water for 50 minutes, turning them once. 50 min
- Lift out, rest 5 minutes, then cut the string; the masa should come away from the leaf in one clean slab. 5 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Frying the paste until the oil splits 95 recipes
- It is being fried, not simmered: the paste is in fat over live heat and moving, holding a steady sizzle throughout rather than bubbling as a wet mass.
- The colour has deepened and darkened from raw to cooked, and the volume has visibly reduced and tightened.
- The split, the signal the whole technique is named for, is unmistakable when it comes: clear fat separates out and pools at the edges and on the surface, and the paste pulls away from the pan floor in one mass.
- The smell has turned from sharp and raw to round and fragrant, with no raw bite left from any of the aromatics that went into it.
- Nothing has caught: no black specks through the paste, no bitterness, and a pan floor that is browned but not burnt.
Where it goes wrong It was taken off as soon as it smelled good, before the fat separated; the raw edge of the aromatics is still in it, and the finished dish tastes thin and sharp no matter how long it simmers afterwards.
Knife cuts: dice, julienne, bias 150 recipes
- Take any three pieces from anywhere in the pile: they match closely enough in every dimension that you would have to measure them to argue otherwise.
- The cut faces are flat and clean rather than ragged or crushed; leaves and herbs are cut through, not bruised, and the board carries no dark smear where they were.
- The stated size is the actual size, held against a rule or a known reference rather than called about right.
- Everything in the pile is the shape that was asked for: no wedges, no half pieces, and no offcuts swept in to avoid waste.
- They cook evenly, which is the entire point: at the end of cooking nothing is still raw and nothing has collapsed.
Where it goes wrong The knife was dull, or the vegetable was never squared off first, so the pieces vary: the small ones are mush by the time the large ones are cooked, and the dish has two textures where it wanted one.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Chenin Blanc (Vouvray sec)
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
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