Bunuelos
Use recipe for and fry same as Swedish Timbales, using a Bunuelos iron. Serve with cooked fruit and with or without whipped cream sweetened and flavored.
This is a cross-reference recipe: the batter and frying method come from the Swedish Timbale entry a page or two earlier, and only the iron and the sweet service change. Everything hinges on how the iron is handled.
- What the batter isFarmer's timbale batter is a thin pour-batter of egg, milk, flour, a little sugar, salt and a spoonful of oil, beaten smooth. Nothing in the book specifies a consistency; a batter too thick to flow will coat the iron heavily and cling to it.
- The iron, and the one ruleA bunuelos or rosette iron is a shaped cast form on a long handle. Heat the iron in the fat until it is as hot as the fat, then dip it into the batter part way only, never letting the batter run over the top of the iron; if it does, the shell locks on and tears when you try to release it.
- Fat temperatureModern practice puts the fat in the region of 360-375F. Farmer gauged deep fat by how long it took to brown a cube of bread, the time varying with the mixture; the recipe itself specifies nothing. Too cool and the shells absorb fat; too hot and they colour before they set.
- Releasing and drainingLower the coated iron into the fat, and after a few seconds the shell loosens by itself; if it does not, ease it off with a fork. Fry until pale gold, then drain hollow-side down on paper.
- Between shellsReturn the iron to the hot fat before each dip. A cooled iron will not take an even coat of batter, which is the usual reason a batch starts well and then falls apart.
- Serving"Cooked fruit" here means stewed or preserved fruit -- apples, plums, apricots, cherries -- spooned into the shells at the last moment. They soften within minutes, so fill only what will be eaten. A dusting of sugar and cinnamon is the more familiar treatment now.
Buñuelo is simply the Spanish word for a fritter, and in Spain and Latin America it most often means a piece of dough -- yeasted, choux-like, or a stretched wheat disc -- dropped into hot fat. What Fannie Farmer means by it is narrower: the same batter and the same deep-fat technique as her Swedish timbales, shaped by an ornamental iron rather than the plain cup-shaped timbale form. Irons of this kind were sold under a scatter of names, including rosette, timbale and bunuelos, the difference between them being largely the pattern of the head. The economy is plain enough: one batter, one kettle of fat, and a shell that could be sent to table under creamed chicken or under stewed fruit as a sweet.