Taste El Salvador
El Salvador
The smallest country in Central America, with a kitchen built on corn masa, red beans, cheese and the pupusa.
Salvadoran food is masa in the hand: pupusas griddled at every corner, tamales in banana leaf, thick tortillas with every meal. Red silk beans rather than black, refried with cream for breakfast, and a fondness for fresh and dry cheeses, salted crema and quesillo. Curtido and thin tomato salsa are on every table. Yuca is boiled or fried and piled with chicharrón; the Pacific coast cooks fish and shellfish into mariscadas. Sweet things lean on rice flour, cheese and panela: quesadilla cake, semita, nuégados. Coffee is the national drink and the national crop.
4 recipes · 1 cuisine
All dishes 4
- 1 hr 10 min
Pupusas
Pupusas revueltas
Thick Salvadoran griddled corn cakes sealed around cheese, refried beans and chicharrón, eaten with curtido.
Medium
- 2 hr 20 min
Curtido
Salvadoran cabbage and carrot slaw lightly pickled in vinegar and oregano — the required partner to pupusas.
Very easy
- 1 hr 10 min
Yuca frita con chicharrón
Boiled-then-fried cassava batons with crisp pork belly, curtido and a thin tomato salsa — Salvadoran plaza food.
Easy
- 55 min
Quesadilla salvadoreña
Not a tortilla: a sweet, salty Salvadoran cheese pound cake made with rice flour and crema, topped with sesame.
Easy
Regional cuisines
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4 quiz dishes. Optional — Passport stamps still come from cooking.
Take the El Salvador food quizFood history
The Pipil and Lenca peoples grew corn, beans, squash and cacao and shaped the filled masa cakes that became pupusas. Spanish settlers added pork, dairy, rice and wheat, and cattle ranching gave the western departments their cheese culture. Coffee planting in the nineteenth century reorganised the country and its cities. Civil war from 1980 to 1992 sent a third of Salvadorans abroad, and the pupuserías of Los Angeles, Washington and Houston became the cuisine's most visible outposts, sending remittances and recipes home.
Common ingredients
Techniques
- griddling pupusas on the comal
- quick pickling curtido
- boiling and frying yuca
- rendering chicharrón
- baking with rice flour and cheese