Chupaqueso.com

While I was in the local Hy-Vee grocery store today buying the usual stuff, I noticed a display case full of eye-catching boxes: Van Harden’s Cheese Crust Pizza. Naturally, I had to try one.

The crust is made with cheese and starch, and bakes up to a more-or-less crusty consistency - or would, at least, if I’d followed the directions a bit more exactly. (They call for 10-12 minutes at 450 degrees F, or until the cheese melts; the cheese had melted on mine at 8 minutes, but I let it run till 10 anyway.) It is very important to let it cool for 5 minutes to let the crust set. (I did that.)

The results weren’t bad, though it wasn’t the nice crispy crust I expected. The tomato sauce was quite good, and there was enough cheese and sausage on mine to satisfy me. I’m definitely going to try again, this time following the directions a bit more exactly.

If you live in a place with a Hy-Vee store, you should be able to find it in the frozen food section. If you don’t, and are feeling adventurous, you can also order online; they’ll ship overnight, in an insulated box with dry ice to keep it frozen.

We’ll be doing our famous chupaqueso demonstration and eat-in at Penguicon 5.0. The con runs from Friday, April 20 through Sunday, April 22 in Troy, Michigan (Detroit metropolitan area). The chupaqueso panel will be in the con suite, from 4 to 5:30 PM on Saturday.

Come see how we do it. Come taste one for yourself. Come suggest even stranger things to put in them (the last person who did that invented the chocolate chupaqueso!). Come meet the two of us, and maybe even some really famous people.

I got the following email this morning:

Hi Howard,

I just wanted to write to you to say thank you for the chupaqueso recipe and tell you that it worked amazingly well!!

It’s my sister’s birthday today, so I decided to treat her and cook her a chupaqueso for lunch (that and I was desperate to try it out). I used cheddar cheese for the shell and mozzerella with bacon and tomato sauce for the inside. Before I started, I honestly didn’t think it would work! I was really surprised that the cheese DID turn into a crunchy shell. Not that I doubted you and your recipe, but still, I had reservations. Especially as I’m not a great lover of melted cheese myself.

Anyway, as I said, it went spot on, and was cooked to perfection. Not a burnt strand of cheese in sight! My sister enjoyed it so much, I used the leftover cheese to make her another of the same.

Of course, this might just lead into a curious obsession, as I experiment and try to make different varieties. Naturally, my family will be the guinea pigs (but I don’t think they’ll be too unhappy about that).

So, thanks again, Howard, my sister loved her birthday present. If you want to have a look, I have attached a small picture of the first one. It’s not amazingly good, as I only had the camera on my phone available at the time.

Looking forward to the next Schlock book!

Best wishes,
J.

I’m always pleased when chupaquesos make people happy. I’m doubly-pleased in this case, because the happiness was shared.

then how about a video? The folks at See Us Eat have put up a video demonstration of how to make a chupaqueso. Check it out.

A chupaqueso reader blogged this on his own site, and kindly granted permssion for us to reprint it here:

Howard Tayler […] is also a low carb dieter. Inspired by his creation Chupaqueso, we varied our breakfast and cooked this version with avacadoes, salami, sour cream and tomatoes. Variants of the cheese-frying shell dish is sure to continue.

I love eggrolls. I don’t know whether or not they’re an authentic asian food, and frankly, I don’t care. I just love ‘em.

It’s probably because they’re deep fried. (That’s as close as we’re getting to “chupaqueso” in this post folks — the word “fried.”)

Years ago I bought some eggroll wrappers and tried to make my own. I remember being frustrated by the results. So frustrated that I think I went an entire decade before allowing myself to be tempted by those wrappers again.

It turns out there are really only three tricks to making delicious eggrolls:

1) Chop the filling finely, and use as many of the “right” ingredients as you can. These include sausage, cabbage, grated carrot, green onion, and ginger–all of which should be cooked together before assembly.

2) Wrap tightly, and use a little water to stick the last corner in place.

3) Deep fry.

We’ve bought eggrolls from the local Chinese food places, and my kids love ‘em. We’ve bought pre-made eggrolls at the grocery store, and nobody will eat them. When I began lifting obviously home-cooked eggrolls out of the fryer, the kids were dubious.

They were even more worried about the homemade sweet-and-sour sauce — I added food coloring, but it wasn’t quite the right shade of obviously-artificial-red.

Then they tasted them, and I got that compliment that home-cooks LIVE for.

“Daddy, these are the better than any of the ones we buy!”

The woman accused of hiring a hit-man to help her steal what she THOUGHT was cocaine just pleaded guilty to charges of attempted murder. The 18-year-old was sentenced to 15 years in prison. The odds are good that she’ll be paroled, but not on her first request, which means this stupid, greedy, evil little girl will be off the streets for about six years.

I hope that while she’s in prison they make her eat some cheese, but somehow I doubt prison food includes cheese worth eating.

I got the variety pack of cheese in from the WSU creamery yesterday. So far, I’ve only opened the Cougar Gold and the Crimson Fire, but both are quite yummy.

Cougar Gold is a hard, somewhat crumbly, cheese that tastes like one of the English cheeses whose name I can’t remember (mainly since it’s been a year or more since I last had some). (Update: upon reading the description at the Cheese Encyclopedia, I think it’s Cheshire.) It’s quite good, and I’ll probably be getting a can of it when this box runs out. I might even try it as chupaqueso filling with a bit of bacon, just to see how it holds up.

Crimson Fire is a softer cheese that’s full of pepper. This ain’t no namby-pamby Pepper Jack, either: while it won’t send diehard Dave’s Insanity Sauce fans running for the chocolate dish, the average person will be left with no doubt he’s gotten hold of something fiery. All of that does a very good job of hiding the fact that the cheese around the peppers is low-fat.

When I get through these two, I’ll break out the American Cheddar and Dill Garlic varieties. I expect they’ll be pretty good, too.

…is that you don’t have to put up with the most idiotic question in customer service: “How’s everything tasting?”

Anyone who knows about customer service will tell you that collecting customer feedback is essential both in satisfying the customer and in making sure they stay a customer. Table service at a restaurant is probably one of the best fields for customer feedback, since there are several customer-staff interactions in any transaction. A good service representative (for that’s what a waiter is) will do his best to collect as much feedback as he can as unobtrusively as he can.

“How’s everything tasting?” utterly fails in that regard. It’s narrowly drawn to only inquire about the food. Yes, that’s important, but it’s not all there is. There are lots of other factors that influence the customer’s satisfaction, ranging from the service itself to the restaurant environment. The customer can, and even sometimes does, tell the restaurant that there’s a problem that needs fixing. Who’s he gonna tell? That’s right, the waiter.

There’s another aspect to this that grates on me. That question was not invented by a waiter, especially not the airheaded 20-year-old woman who seems to be the type most likely to use it. It’s way, way too artificial. It smells strongly of consultant, with careful vetting by focus group before being mandated by management in a corporate office somewhere. It’s stilted and jarring.

I used to give the waiters and waitresses who use it a hard time. I don’t any more, because it’s counterproductive. As someone pointed out, hassling the person who handles your food is not a good idea.

I’d like to find the restaurant consultant who came up with “How’s it tasting?”, strap him to a chair, and send every waiter within 50 miles to ask him that question.

Until then, I’ll just avoid the places where it’s most endemic, and stay home and make chupaquesos, instead.

Technically, a “monger” is “a dealer in a specific commodity.” Since I don’t SELL cheese, I guess I can’t be a true cheesemonger. But I do deal it out to myself, and I’ve gotten pretty good at it.

My secret: ziploc bags, cling wrap, and a cold windowsill.

Big pieces of cheese get cling-wrapped and ziploc’d, and put into the fridge.

Medium-sized pieces of cheese get cut from the big pieces, cling-wrapped separately, and then set upon our North-facing kitchen window sill.

Small pieces of cheese (one snack’s worth) get cut from the medium-sized bits and eaten, but only AFTER the medium-sized bits have been on the sill for a couple of hours. Good cheese is best consumed at room temperature.

I’m pretty sure that temperatures on that sill never exceed 65 F in the winter. I’ve had medium-sized chunks sit there for two or three days, and they were just fine for cutting into and eating. In fact, they were PERFECT. I now try to only deal myself cheese after it’s been out for a day.

In this way I’m still making my way through the last 3/8ths of a wheel of Shitake-Leek Appalachian. There’s a quarter-wheel in cling-and-zip with the rind still on it, and 1/8th wheel, trimmed, in cling wrap on the sill.

I just got two cans of Washington State University “Cougar” cheese from a reader, and some of that is on the sill right now, too. I’ll write more about that stuff in another post. It’s taaaaasty.