Chef’s Plate: Salvadorian Cheese Stuffed Pupusas

Salvadorian Cheese Stuffed Pupusas with Homemade Refried Beans and Radish Salad

I absolutely love cooking with Chef’s Plate because it is so easy and fun to make the dishes! For this next plate that I received from Chef’s Plate, I chose Salvadorian Cheese Stuffed Pupusas with homemade refried beans and radish salad. I was so excited to try this because I’ve had pupusas before (recently for the first time) and was highly intrigued to find out how I could make these myself at home to eat!

Chef’s Plate is a home grocery delivery service where you get to pick out the dish that you want to make online (they have a super easy and straight-forward to use website) and they deliver you pre-portioned ingredients to make it. It’s super convenient and easy! I also adore their referral program where every time you share your referral code with a friend, you both benefit — you get two plates of food and your friend gets four plates! Try it here (use referral code: #freeplatesfromstenoodie). 🙂

Recipe card (front and back sides)

This recipe for the Salvadorian Cheese Stuffed Pupusas with homemade refried beans and radish salad called for 25 minutes of prep time with a difficulty level of Medium. I was so excited to make this! 😀

All the ingredients that came inside the box

First, wash and cut up all the veggies!

Drain and rinse the black beans. Mash up one half of them while leaving the other half intact. The mashing part was so fun 😀

Making the cheese pupusas! Mix water with the masa harina and mix well with your hands. Then roll them into balls! Flatten and then add cheese. Cover up the pupusas with the other remaining half of the discs

Mixing, rolling, flattening, and closing up the pupusas took the most amount of time for me because I had to make sure that the discs didn’t accidentally break apart when handling them.

Cooking the refried beans! Add onion, spice mix, tomato paste, crushed black beans, and whole black beans. Cook and simmer until liquid is mostly evaporated

Cooking the pupusas. 4 minutes on each side until crispy. Awesome!

All done! 😀

Looking back, it was quite easy to make this. I found it so unique to be able to make pupusas for the first time at home! It was straight forward to make but you had to make sure that you mixed all of the masa harina flour with the water thoroughly and that when lifting the pupusa discs from the cutting board that you are careful otherwise they will fall apart easily. I found that running some hot water under a knife helped to lift the discs from the cutting board easier. (I think this process just gets easier with practice, so I’m sure that those who make pupusas regularly have perfected this skill quite well! 🙂 )

Not the best at plating food….

See? All of this makes two portions!

I really enjoyed the radish salad since it was so refreshing and the quickest and most nutritious salad I think that can be made in under 5 minutes. I don’t eat raw radishes very often so I really enjoyed this. Cutting them into matchstick-like shapes also was a good idea.

The refried beans were actually really delicious as well. I never thought that I could make such tasty refried beans at home! The first time I had refried beans was at the resort in Punta Cana. I remembered how delicious those were! 🙂

The pupusas turned out delicious as well. I thought at first that the minimal amount of Monterey Jack cheese inside the pupusa wouldn’t be enough to carry out a strong flavour but it actually was really tasty! You have to make sure that you eat the pupusas hot, however, because they definitely taste the best fresh and hot from the pan. They were crispy on the outside as well. Yay! 🙂