Alfajores, alhaja, alcatraz….
How Moorish are we? The answer for Latin America is: very. We can’t swing a dead gato* (*husband-bequeathed and yucky+strange expression that I find oddly inescapable) without hitting an instance where we use a Spanish word of Moorish origin. These words are sometimes easy to spot, a whole lot of them beginning with their telltale AL syllable, and so many including the very satisfying to conjure up from the back of your throat, like a cat about to cough up a fur ball, Spanish hard J sound (again with the gatos!).
The epitome of Arabic infusion in our daily lives is the word Ojalá – pronounced oh-ha-LAH. It signifies a gorgeous sounding “let us hope” or “may it be so.” We use it all the time, without much thought about its provenance, but the reality is that it literally means, If Allah wills it. And this coming from a population that is 90% Christian. I love realizations like those. It gives me hope for less exclusion in this world, less “us versus them” and more interaction between beliefs and cultures. Little do people know that Allah fills their everydays like OMG fills those of teenagers throughout the world, the pious or those that are not even sure what the word ‘pious’ means. Ojalá is the lovely legacy that has permeated countless wishful sentences for centuries.
Sleep on that one. Sleep on that one every night on your cozy, fluffy almohada.
Alfajores, the wondrous cookies made up of two crumble-in-your-hands, shortbread-like but more fragile than shortbread disks, deliciously married together by a generous dollop of Dulce de Leche filling, and then showered with white powder sugar so that there is no way you can eat them demurely or without making a full-on mess on yourself are a Latin American treasure. But again before we begin, let us thank the Moors.
Every country in Latin America claims it as their own, like Argentina for example. I am OK with that on some level because my dad was from Buenos Aires, and I loved seeing the pride with which he would claim certain things as only Argentine – Milanesas, Empanadas – whether misinformed or not. However, I am more unity-centric when it comes to how I see Latin America. If the US gets to fuse 50 states into one vast, beautiful but bossy country, then I think we would benefit from a friendlier coexistence as Latin American countries. Another case of not "Us" and "Them" – but "We." Sure, I believe Pisco originated in Perú, but if a Chileno says it did in his country, that's not the end of the world. I need to work to get over patriotic copyrights on Pisco, ceviche, potatoes. So hard to do, but I am guessing life will be more peaceful.
So here is the simple recipe for the ubiquitous Alfajores, which closely follows the one in the adorable, yellow and white striped covered cookbooks that the pasta maker Nicolini gave away as a promotion in the 60s or 70s in Perú. I think my mom stockpiled a handful and gave me one when I was around 10. I just know that it is such an old book because it has a foreword by the Hermanos Nicolini that is addressed “Señora Ama de casa” – Mrs. Homemaker…. That is old school.
The only change I have made over the decades of using this recipe is that I take away a 3/4 cup measure of the flour and I replace it with toasted almonds that I grind up into a flour-consistency.
Alfajores con Dulce de Leche (modified from Alfajor con Manjarblanco)
3-1/4 cups of flour
3/4 cup of ground, lightly toasted almonds
zest of 1 lemon
1-1/2 cups butter
powder sugar
dulce de leche (preparation instructions below)
Sift flour and add softened butter, then lemon zest; mix gently.
Knead dough and then separate 1/2 of it to roll out with rolling pin; ultimate dough thickness should be about 1/4”.
Use a small glass or your circular cutting object of choice to cut out rounds (I like about a 2” diameter
glass for cutting the cookies).
Repeat this with second 1/2 portion of the dough.
Place rounds in a cookie sheet – no butter or flour on surface needed.
Perforate twice on the cookie tops with a fork. This seemed to be so that the cookies would not fluff up into domes and would stay nice and flat, but I have never had a problem even when I have forgotten to go over them with the fork tines. Now I just keep doing it because I love the little puncture designs on the cookie tops.
Bake at 325ºF for 15-20 minutes depending on the mercurial, hot-headed ways of your particular oven. I like my Alfajores just starting to get barely toasted, but still quite light.
Let cool and assemble with Dulce de Leche in the center.
Roll the assembled cookies onto a plate of powder sugar to coat the edges (the sugar will stick to the Dulce that is peeking through) and then lightly sift a bit of powder sugar on the top of the finished cookie.
This recipe is easier to follow if you know where you are going with it, so luckily, in my ever-documenting photographic endeavors, I once step-by-stepped it with a pictorial collection of the Alfajor-making process:
www.flickr.com/photos/22996143@N06/sets/72157632207640005/
Before you begin the prep of your almonds and the flailing of flour on your kitchen counters and all over yourself, you have to begin with the star of the show: the Dulce de Leche. For this, you need to plan ahead because it needs a three-hour head start. Yes, you read right: 3 hours. Maybe all the recipes that I will post, like the now famous Congee (Week 6), will have to be about waiting in Zen patience for hours upon hours for boiling pots to do their thang….
The Dulce de Leche I make, and that my mom and Hila and my sister made at home for what seemed like millennia, is really simple. All it is is cans of condensed milk, boiled and boiled and boiled.
Making Dulce de Leche is about faith. The can will not explode. Well, given that you are mindful of the water level in the boiling process and that the cans are always submerged in a generous amount of water. Otherwise, I am guessing a physics/thermodynamics lesson will be in your near future. Condensed milk only helps those who help themselves? [That said, please don’t prove me wrong about how the cans have never exploded. Don’t be that person.] After three hours in the pot, the cans of condensed milk will become amber brown deliciousness: caramel! And you will feel like a fabled alchemist or Rumplestilskin, having turned straw into gold.
I think comedian Tim Allen once said in his stand-up: "Never underestimate the power of a cookie." Well, this powerful cookie, the Alfajor, has been bonding countries and continents across geographies and time – as its two light golden circles are fused by their magical caramel heart – for thousands of years.
¡Buen provecho y ojalá les guste!
How Moorish are we? The answer for Latin America is: very. We can’t swing a dead gato* (*husband-bequeathed and yucky+strange expression that I find oddly inescapable) without hitting an instance where we use a Spanish word of Moorish origin. These words are sometimes easy to spot, a whole lot of them beginning with their telltale AL syllable, and so many including the very satisfying to conjure up from the back of your throat, like a cat about to cough up a fur ball, Spanish hard J sound (again with the gatos!).
The epitome of Arabic infusion in our daily lives is the word Ojalá – pronounced oh-ha-LAH. It signifies a gorgeous sounding “let us hope” or “may it be so.” We use it all the time, without much thought about its provenance, but the reality is that it literally means, If Allah wills it. And this coming from a population that is 90% Christian. I love realizations like those. It gives me hope for less exclusion in this world, less “us versus them” and more interaction between beliefs and cultures. Little do people know that Allah fills their everydays like OMG fills those of teenagers throughout the world, the pious or those that are not even sure what the word ‘pious’ means. Ojalá is the lovely legacy that has permeated countless wishful sentences for centuries.
Sleep on that one. Sleep on that one every night on your cozy, fluffy almohada.
Alfajores, the wondrous cookies made up of two crumble-in-your-hands, shortbread-like but more fragile than shortbread disks, deliciously married together by a generous dollop of Dulce de Leche filling, and then showered with white powder sugar so that there is no way you can eat them demurely or without making a full-on mess on yourself are a Latin American treasure. But again before we begin, let us thank the Moors.
Every country in Latin America claims it as their own, like Argentina for example. I am OK with that on some level because my dad was from Buenos Aires, and I loved seeing the pride with which he would claim certain things as only Argentine – Milanesas, Empanadas – whether misinformed or not. However, I am more unity-centric when it comes to how I see Latin America. If the US gets to fuse 50 states into one vast, beautiful but bossy country, then I think we would benefit from a friendlier coexistence as Latin American countries. Another case of not "Us" and "Them" – but "We." Sure, I believe Pisco originated in Perú, but if a Chileno says it did in his country, that's not the end of the world. I need to work to get over patriotic copyrights on Pisco, ceviche, potatoes. So hard to do, but I am guessing life will be more peaceful.
So here is the simple recipe for the ubiquitous Alfajores, which closely follows the one in the adorable, yellow and white striped covered cookbooks that the pasta maker Nicolini gave away as a promotion in the 60s or 70s in Perú. I think my mom stockpiled a handful and gave me one when I was around 10. I just know that it is such an old book because it has a foreword by the Hermanos Nicolini that is addressed “Señora Ama de casa” – Mrs. Homemaker…. That is old school.
The only change I have made over the decades of using this recipe is that I take away a 3/4 cup measure of the flour and I replace it with toasted almonds that I grind up into a flour-consistency.
Alfajores con Dulce de Leche (modified from Alfajor con Manjarblanco)
3-1/4 cups of flour
3/4 cup of ground, lightly toasted almonds
zest of 1 lemon
1-1/2 cups butter
powder sugar
dulce de leche (preparation instructions below)
Sift flour and add softened butter, then lemon zest; mix gently.
Knead dough and then separate 1/2 of it to roll out with rolling pin; ultimate dough thickness should be about 1/4”.
Use a small glass or your circular cutting object of choice to cut out rounds (I like about a 2” diameter
glass for cutting the cookies).
Repeat this with second 1/2 portion of the dough.
Place rounds in a cookie sheet – no butter or flour on surface needed.
Perforate twice on the cookie tops with a fork. This seemed to be so that the cookies would not fluff up into domes and would stay nice and flat, but I have never had a problem even when I have forgotten to go over them with the fork tines. Now I just keep doing it because I love the little puncture designs on the cookie tops.
Bake at 325ºF for 15-20 minutes depending on the mercurial, hot-headed ways of your particular oven. I like my Alfajores just starting to get barely toasted, but still quite light.
Let cool and assemble with Dulce de Leche in the center.
Roll the assembled cookies onto a plate of powder sugar to coat the edges (the sugar will stick to the Dulce that is peeking through) and then lightly sift a bit of powder sugar on the top of the finished cookie.
This recipe is easier to follow if you know where you are going with it, so luckily, in my ever-documenting photographic endeavors, I once step-by-stepped it with a pictorial collection of the Alfajor-making process:
www.flickr.com/photos/22996143@N06/sets/72157632207640005/
Before you begin the prep of your almonds and the flailing of flour on your kitchen counters and all over yourself, you have to begin with the star of the show: the Dulce de Leche. For this, you need to plan ahead because it needs a three-hour head start. Yes, you read right: 3 hours. Maybe all the recipes that I will post, like the now famous Congee (Week 6), will have to be about waiting in Zen patience for hours upon hours for boiling pots to do their thang….
The Dulce de Leche I make, and that my mom and Hila and my sister made at home for what seemed like millennia, is really simple. All it is is cans of condensed milk, boiled and boiled and boiled.
Making Dulce de Leche is about faith. The can will not explode. Well, given that you are mindful of the water level in the boiling process and that the cans are always submerged in a generous amount of water. Otherwise, I am guessing a physics/thermodynamics lesson will be in your near future. Condensed milk only helps those who help themselves? [That said, please don’t prove me wrong about how the cans have never exploded. Don’t be that person.] After three hours in the pot, the cans of condensed milk will become amber brown deliciousness: caramel! And you will feel like a fabled alchemist or Rumplestilskin, having turned straw into gold.
I think comedian Tim Allen once said in his stand-up: "Never underestimate the power of a cookie." Well, this powerful cookie, the Alfajor, has been bonding countries and continents across geographies and time – as its two light golden circles are fused by their magical caramel heart – for thousands of years.
¡Buen provecho y ojalá les guste!
And this week, a classic....
Sesame Street - The Cookie Monster Sings C is for Cookie
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ye8mB6VsUHw
Sesame Street - The Cookie Monster Sings C is for Cookie
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ye8mB6VsUHw