Cooking in
France
Mexican
Pacholas (Pork Meat Patties)
Pacholas are thin, pan-fried pork patties from the Mexican home kitchen — humble in ingredient count but precise in technique. Ground pork is blended with milk-soaked bread, onion, parsley, and egg into a soft paste, then pressed flat using a tortilla press and fried in lard until deeply browned. The result sits somewhere between a croquette and a burger: crisp at the edges, tender within, and honest in flavor. Diana Kennedy documents them as a general Mexican preparation, the kind of recipe passed between cooks rather than printed in restaurant menus.
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I
The Market List
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225 g (½ lb)
finely ground pork
Your own market
1 small
bolillo or French bread roll, 3-inch piece
80 ml (⅓ cup)
milk
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¼ small
white onion, roughly sliced
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3 large
flat-leaf parsley sprigs, roughly chopped
1 large
egg
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Sea salt, to taste
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Flour, for hands and plastic bags
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Lard or safflower oil, for frying
II
The Method
1
Tear the bread into pieces and soak in the milk until fully saturated.
2
Combine the soaked bread and any remaining milk with the pork, onion, parsley, egg, and salt. Blend together until a soft, uniform paste forms.
3
Flour your hands and the inside surfaces of two plastic bags. Divide the mixture into tablespoon-sized portions and roll each into a ball.
4
Place a ball between the floured bags and press flat in a tortilla press to form a disk roughly 10 cm (4 inches) across.
From the canon — The corn tortilla is the foundational food of Mexican cuisine — a thin, round disc of nixtamalized masa cooked on an ungreased comal (flat griddle) until it … Tortilla — hand press, comal, and the puff →
5
Heat lard or oil in a heavy skillet over medium-high heat to approximately 175°C (350°F).
6
Fry patties in batches, about 2 minutes per side, until browned on both surfaces and cooked through.
7
Drain on paper towels. Keep warm in a low oven at 90°C (195°F) until ready to serve.
III
Sensory Tests
◇Press the raw patty lightly with one finger before it goes into the pan: it should yield slowly and spring back about halfway, like a firm mousse. If it is dense and rubbery, the bread was not soaked long enough or the mixture was over-processed; if it collapses and does not spring back at all, there is too much liquid and the patty will fall apart in the pan.
◇The finished pachola should lift cleanly from the pan with a spatula and hold its shape without drooping — a sign the starch from the bread has set properly. Tap the underside of the crust: it should sound faintly hollow and feel rigid, not soft or oil-logged.
◇Cut through the center at the table and look for a uniform pale-tan interior with no visible gray band or pink center. The cut surface should glisten faintly from internal fat but not weep grease; if liquid pools in the cut, the fat-to-lean ratio or frying temperature was off.
◇Where it lives or dies. The pachola lives or dies at the moment it meets the pan: lard must be shimmering and hot — 175–180 °C (347–356 °F) — before the patty goes in. A pan that is even slightly underheated causes the meat-and-bread mixture to absorb fat rather than repel it, producing a greasy, soft patty that never develops the crisp exterior that holds the whole preparation together.
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V
What to Pour
The pairing
Beer
From France
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The whole pairingPillar VI
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The working kitchen