Puchas de Santa Rosa de Viterbo

Ingredients

Equipment Needed

• •Large mixing bowl
• •Wooden spoon
• •Rolling pin or the palm of your hand for flattening
• •Paring knife, fork, or ridged pastry cutter for marking the concha pattern
• •Two baking sheets
• •Wire cooling rack

Instructions

1. 1

   Mix the dry base

   Whisk the flour, sugar, Mexican cinnamon, salt, and baking powder in a wide bowl. Break up any lumps with your fingers. Convent baking is precise but not precious. The cinnamon should be evenly scattered through the flour so every pucha tastes the same.

2. 2

   Rub in the lard

   Add the room-temperature manteca de cerdo and rub it into the flour with your fingertips until the mixture looks sandy with a few small pebbles of fat left. Do not melt the lard. Those little pockets give the biscuit its short, tender bite. No me vengas con atajos.

3. 3

   Bind the dough

   Beat the egg yolks, whole egg, milk, vanilla, and aguardiente if using. Pour into the flour mixture and stir with a wooden spoon until a firm dough forms. If dry flour stays at the bottom, add the extra tablespoon of milk, no more. This dough should not be sticky. Sticky dough loses the ridges and bakes like a soft cookie.

4. 4

   Rest the dough

   Turn the dough onto a lightly floured table and knead five or six times, just until smooth. Cover with a clean kitchen towel and rest 20 minutes. The flour needs time to drink the liquid. If you roll immediately, the dough fights you and cracks at the edges.

5. 5

   Shape the puchas

   Heat the oven to 350F. Line two baking sheets with parchment. Divide the dough into 24 pieces and roll each into a ball. Flatten each ball into a thick oval or round, about 2 1/2 inches wide. Press shallow curved lines across the top with the back of a knife, a clean comb-style cutter, or the tines of a fork to make the concha pattern. Cut marks, not deep wounds. You want ridges, not split dough.

   If the dough sticks to the cutter, dust the top lightly with flour and keep going. Do not add more milk. The dough is telling you it needs flour on the surface, not more liquid inside.
6. 6

   Brush and sugar

   Place the puchas on the prepared sheets, leaving one inch between them. Brush lightly with beaten egg white and sprinkle with sugar. The egg white gives a quiet shine without turning the tops brown too quickly. These are pale gold biscuits, not dark bakery shells.

7. 7

   Bake until set

   Bake 18 to 22 minutes, rotating the sheets halfway through, until the edges are firm and the bottoms are lightly golden. The tops should stay pale with the ridges still visible. If they smell strongly toasted, you went too far. Let them cool on the sheet for 10 minutes, then move to a rack.

8. 8

   Serve and keep

   Serve completely cooled with cafe de olla, atole, or hot chocolate. Store in a tin or clay jar once cold. They improve after a few hours because the crumb settles and the cinnamon comes forward. This is make-ahead food, the kind a convent kitchen understood perfectly.

Chef Tips

• •Buy fresh manteca de cerdo from a butcher or a serious Mexican market. If it smells old, do not use it. Rancid lard will ruin the whole batch and cinnamon will not hide it.
• •Mexican cinnamon, canela de Ceilan, is softer and more floral than the hard cassia sticks sold in many supermarkets. Grind it fresh if you can. A small detail, but the old convent sweets depend on these small details.
• •The aguardiente is optional, not decorative. A spoonful perfumes the dough and helps the texture dry cleanly. If you leave it out, do not replace it with extra milk unless the dough truly needs it.
• •Do not make these huge. Puchas are meant to be stacked, sold, packed, and carried home. A giant one becomes a novelty. The dish does not need novelties.

Advance Preparation

• •The dough can be made one day ahead, wrapped tightly, and refrigerated. Let it sit at room temperature for 25 minutes before shaping so the lard softens enough to mark cleanly.
• •Baked puchas keep for 5 days in a tightly covered tin. They are better after the first few hours and still good the next day, which is exactly why convent kitchens could sell them.
• •Do not freeze the shaped raw dough if you want clean ridges. Freeze the baked puchas instead, then thaw uncovered at room temperature so the surface stays dry.

Frequently Asked Questions

Nutrition Information

1 serving (about 34g)