Photo: Nosferattus · CC0
Papadzules (Egg Tortillas in Pumpkin-Seed Sauce)
A Yucatán tortilla dish: tortillas dipped in a green sauce of toasted ground pumpkin seeds and epazote broth, rolled round chopped hard-boiled egg and covered with more sauce and a habanero tomato sauce. The oil squeezed by hand out of the ground seeds goes on last.
Ingredients
- Pumpkin-seed sauce
- hulled raw pumpkin seeds (pepitas)250 g
- chicken stock or water600 ml
- epazote · or 1 tbsp dried; leave out if you cannot get it2 sprigs
- salt1 tsp
- Tomato sauce
- tomatoes4
- onion0.5
- habanero chilli · whole, pricked a few times with a fork1
- neutral oil1 tbsp
- salt0.5 tsp
- Filling and tortillas
- eggs · hard-boiled and chopped6
- corn tortillas12
Steps
- ⏲ 10 min
Bring the stock to the boil with the epazote and salt and leave it 10 minutes, then lift the epazote out. Keep it warm.
- ⏲ 5 min
Toast the pumpkin seeds in a dry pan over a medium heat, stirring, until they pop and turn golden, about 5 minutes. Spread them out to cool, then grind to a fine powder.
- ⏲ 10 min
Work the powder with just 3 tbsp of the warm stock into a stiff paste. Over a bowl, squeeze the paste hard in your hand: a green oil seeps out and drips. Collect it in a small dish. Re-form and squeeze a few times; you will get 1-2 tbsp.
- ⏲ 5 min
Whisk the rest of the warm stock gradually into the squeezed paste to make a sauce that coats the back of a spoon. Keep it warm over a low heat and do not let it boil.
- ⏲ 10 min
Blend the tomatoes and onion and cook them in the oil with the habanero for 10 minutes. Season with salt and lift the habanero out.
- ⏲ 10 min
Warm the tortillas on a dry pan until pliable. Dip each one in the warm seed sauce, lay a line of chopped egg on it and roll it up.
Set them seam down on the plates, cover with more seed sauce and spoon the tomato sauce over. Sprinkle the reserved green oil on last.
Variations
- With longaniza. Sometimes served with the sausage of Valladolid in Yucatán.
- Sauce on after. Lay the rolled tortillas on the plate first and pour the warm sauce generously over.
- The Yucatán seed. Locally a particular large seed, xt'op or pepita gruesa, from the xka'al pumpkin, is used.
Tips
- Toast the seeds yourself. Their toasted flavour is the flavour of the sauce.
- Squeeze the oil out before the stock goes in. Once the stock is added there is no paste left to squeeze.
- Do not boil the sauce. It turns grainy.
- Roll each tortilla as soon as it is dipped. Left in the sauce it tears.
- Oil goes on last. That way the green sheen sits on top.
More detail and the reasons why (2)
- Where a ground seed's oil goes. According to English Wikipedia, the toasted, ground pumpkin seeds are mixed with a little water and squeezed by hand to get the oil out first, and that oil is kept back and sprinkled over as a garnish. Satsivi holds the oil released from ground walnuts inside the sauce as its body; egusi soup reads the seed oil pushed out as the protein sets, rising to the surface, as the sign it is done; paçoca stops grinding peanuts the moment their oil appears and keeps it as the binder. Papadzules takes the oil out of the sauce and moves it to the top. The sauce is not boiled for the reason egusi soup shows: the protein in ground seeds sets with heat.
- A forerunner of the enchilada? The same article reports the view that this is an ancestor of the enchilada, but notes that no comals for thin tortillas turn up in Yucatán's archaeological record, so it is not clear the dish existed in its present form before the Spanish. The name is explained either as "food of the lords" or as Mayan for "smeared and drenched".
The basics behind this dish
- Browning and the Maillard ReactionMeat fails to brown for one of three reasons: it is wet, the pan is cool, or you put too much in at once. Plus how the brown film stuck to the pan becomes your sauce.
- Cooking Meat: Temperature, Resting, and Cutting Against the GrainDoneness is a core temperature, not a number of minutes. What resting actually does, how to handle a thick cut, and why the direction you slice changes the texture.
- Knife Skills: Grip, Cuts, and Why Size MattersHow you hold the knife matters more than how fast you cut. The pinch grip, the claw hand, and why uniform size is a cooking decision rather than a cosmetic one.
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