Hugo Gutierrez Jr. can make a pupusa, but unless it’s Wednesday or Thursday, when he takes over the cooking at Pupuseria Las Delicias, he leaves them to “the professional,” Ceci Roman, an eight-year veteran of his restaurant.
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A pupusa starts out as a fistful of cornmeal mixed with water. The cook makes a pocket in the masa and fills it with a schmear of beans, cheese, pork, or a combination of all three–for a pupusa revuelta–and slaps it back and forth until it flattens into a thick discus. Then it’s tossed onto a hot griddle, where it’s cooked a few minutes to a side. On the good ones a bit of the filling oozes from the edge and crisps up. Pupusas are served with a side of curtido, a vinegary coleslaw, and some thin red or green salsa. “We put the cabbage on top,” says Gutierrez. “And we just fold it like a taco and eat it like that.” Simple, nutritious, filling, and portable–though they’re best eaten right off the griddle–pupusas digest at the same satisfyingly sluggish metabolic rate as a slice of pizza.
Nine years ago, when he and his first wife, a Salvadoran, had their first child, they decided to capitalize on the business their family had built up at the lakefront. The cramped ten-table space they opened at 4911 N. Western in Lincoln Square also served Guatemalan food: tamales; their smaller cousins, chuchitos; taquitos; and dobladas, tortillas filled with meat and vegetables, folded, and fried. But the focus was pupusas, with an array of fillings beyond the usual–chicharron, chorizo, chile and cheese, ham and cheese, fish, chicken, shrimp, zucchini, the herb chipilin, the loroco flower blossom. On Sunday nights people crowded into the tiny space to sing karaoke to Central American pop. In 2003 Gutierrez threw a pupusa festival in the adjoining church parking lot.
For more on food and drink, see our blog The Food Chain at chicagoreader.com.
