How to make CAPIROTADA!

 

Kah-pee-roh-tah-dah is how you pronounced this beautiful word, that just the sound of it transport me to my mom's kitchen...

Growing up in Mexico, lent was a season with a lot of traditions, not only in the religious part, but also in my mom's kitchen.  

Lent food is very unique and there are dishes for all kinds of paletes, I remember some of sisters dislike some of my mom's  lent dishes,  like 'sopa de haba" ( Broad bean soup) or the  "tortas de camarón con nopales" (shrimp cakes with cactus).  So sometimes we all were not very thrill about lent food, but we all were thrill for lent dessert...CAPIROTADA!! 

When my mom was making capirotada the aroma of the piloncillo and spices filled up all the house and we could not wait to take our first bite!  My mom used to make it almost every Lent Friday, she knew that we all were waiting for dessert!

This is one of the culinary inheritance we received from the Conquistadores, there are archives of the capirotada's recipe back to the 17th century,  in the times of the Inquisition, but I am pretty sure that the addition of some ingredients in the traditional pre-hispanic cuisine make this bread pudding a jewel in the Mexican cuisine and some other Latin-American countries. 

CAPIROTADA

INGREDIENTS:

* One long baguette

* 1 lb piloncillo 

* 1 cascabel pepper 

* 1/2 roma tomato

* 1 cinnamon stick

* 1/2 tsp ground cloves

* 1/4 tsp pepper

* 3 cups water

* 1/4 cup chopped pecans or toasted almonds

* 1/4 cup queso fresco

* 1/2 raisins

La Madeleine or Panera baguettes work wonderful for this recipe.

If you have stale bread you can use it as well. 

PROCEDURE:

Pre-heat oven at 350 ºF

1.-  Cut the baguettes in 1/2  inch slices and placed them in a baking tray in a single layer.

    

2.-  Bake them for 30 min, you can flip them around the 15 min mark. 

This is how your bread should look like after baked.

3-  Pour some oil that only cover the bottom of your pan  and heat it, once is hot , lower the temperature a little bit and put the bread pieces for 5  seconds or so from each side until is light golden, you don't want a full fried piece of bread. This is a part where you need to pay a lot of attention, too much oil won't be nice on your capirotada.  Set them aside. 

You can also use an air fryer. 

4.-  Clean and toast the chiles, then take out the seeds and the veins.

5.-  Cut the tomato in quarters.

6.-  In a sauce pan put the water, piloncillo, spices, tomatoes and chiles and bring them to a rolling boil and  let the syrup simmer until it thickens a little bit and it reduces in half its volume, this will be a very fluid syrup.

7.-  In an oven proof dish place a layer of the bread pieces and then using a strainer pour the syrup over the bread, add raisins, pecans  and repite with the another layer of the same ingredients, finishing up with cheese. 

8.-  Bake for 30 minutes until the bread is soft and the syrup if bubbling. 

Please don't forget to follow me on Pinterest HERE where you can see some videos on how to make this delicious KAH-PEE-ROH-TAH-DAH.

Enjoy!!