Sopaipillas Norteñas

Sopaipillas are from the north. Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, the high plains where wheat grows and cattle are raised and the kitchen smells like flour and manteca, not corn and chile. If you grew up in central or southern Mexico, you may have never seen one. That is the point. This is a 32-state cuisine, and the north has its own bread.

A sopaipilla is leavened wheat dough cut into triangles, fried in hot lard until it balloons hollow. The puff is the dish. A flat sopaipilla is a failure. Two things make the puff happen: dough rolled to exactly the right thickness, around a quarter inch, and frying fat at exactly the right temperature, 375 degrees. Miss either and you have fried bread. Hit both and you have a sopaipilla.

My mother was from Jalisco and she did not make these. I learned sopaipillas from a senora in Saltillo named Dona Cruz who has been frying them in pork lard for fifty years on a wood-burning stove. She told me the trick is to press the dough gently into the oil with the back of a spoon for the first two seconds. That little push starts the steam pocket. Without it, the sopaipilla cooks flat. With it, the inside opens up like a bag. La manteca es el sabor, and at Christmas, when she drizzles them with piloncillo syrup spiked with canela and orange peel, the whole house smells like the north in December.