Baleadas

Ingredients

• Flour400 g
• Lard or shortening60 g
• Hot water220 ml
• Red beans — cooked400 g
• Onion1
• Thick soured cream200 ml
• Salty white cheese150 g
• Eggs — optional4
• Avocado — optional1
• Vegetable oil40 ml
• Saltto taste

Salt and spices grow more slowly than the rest: doubling a dish does not double the pepper.

Weight converts to ounces and volume to cups. Grams of flour are not turned into cups, because that depends on how tightly it is packed.

Method

1. 1

   Rub the flour with the fat and salt to a crumb, add the hot water and knead a soft dough.

   12 min

2. 2

   Divide it into eight balls, oil them and rest them twenty minutes under a cloth.

   22 min

3. 3

   Fry the onion in oil, add the cooked beans with some of their liquid and mash them smooth.

   12 min

4. 4

   Fry the purée over medium heat for ten minutes, until it holds its shape on a spoon.

   12 min

5. 5

   Roll the balls into thin twenty-centimetre rounds.

   12 min

6. 6

   Cook them on a hot dry pan a minute a side, to spotted but not dried out.

   12 min

7. 7

   Spread beans over half the tortilla, add cream and cheese, fold it over and serve hot.

   6 min

About the dish

The tortilla here is wheat and soft rather than corn. It has to fold in half without cracking, which is why fat and hotter water go into the dough.

The beans are mashed smooth and fried in fat until thick — a loose filling runs out of a folded tortilla at the first bite.

The base set — beans, mantequilla cream and cheese — is called sencilla, "plain". Everything else, egg, avocado, meat, counts as an addition and changes the name.

Worth knowing

• — The water goes in hot, almost boiling. It relaxes the gluten so the tortilla folds without cracking.
• — Stack the cooked tortillas under a cloth. In the open air they stiffen within five minutes.
• — Use thick, salted cream. Ordinary sweetish soured cream gives the wrong taste, and Hondurans treat the difference as fundamental.

Nutrition

Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.

Calories

520 kcal

Protein

18 g

Fat

24 g

Carbs

58 g

More from Honduras

• Conch soup — Conch soup in coconut milk with cassava and plantain. The Garifuna cooking of the Caribbean coast.