Sopaipillas
Squash-Flavored Fried Dough
A Chilean afternoon snack of fried dough, the sopaipilla, is made from squash. This version comes from cookbook The Chilean Kitchen.

On rainy days in Santiago, social media is flooded with talk of sopaipillas pasadas, homemade squash-flavored fried dough in a brown sugar syrup. Many Chileans have childhood memories of rainy days in the kitchen, making the dough, rolling it out, piercing it with a fork, and frying it. In the central region of Chile, where squash is always included (which is not the case in other parts of Chile), rains are infrequent and well-announced, giving home cooks lots of time to prepare the squash before kids come home from school.
The afternoon snack of fried dough in a sweet sauce is just one way of eating sopaipillas. We also like them plain or with powdered sugar, and nowadays many people like them savory, with Pebre/Chilean Salsa Fresca, including before a meal at restaurants. Avocado is another popular topping, and we’ve even heard of people topping them with canned mackerel and onions. Like a few other foods in Chile, this one shares its name with another dish—Tex-Mex sopapilla—but the similarity stops there. And most Chileans wouldn’t guess it, but we inherited the word sopaipilla indirectly from the Arabic, and sopaipillas came to Chile via Spanish colonization. ~Eileen Smith + Pilar Hernandez
Reprinted from The Chilean Kitchen: 75 Seasonal Recipes for Stews, Breads, Salads, and Cocktails, Desserts, and More by Eileen Smith, Pilar Hernandez, and Araceli Paz (2020) with permission from Skyhorse Publishing. Click here to purchase your own copy.
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