Hello and good evening to all of you dear friends!
I have a question: when you crave food, what it's your first option?
Do you even have one, or several?
Well, that was two questions, sorry!
I have several options when it comes to crave food because I love food, and even if we didn't have much growing up, and at the present time, we always ate good, and were able to taste delicious things. One of the was the famous and well known Tequeños.
What? Teque what?
Te-Que-Ños.
It's simple, tequeños are just cheese sticks wrapped in dough and deep fried. They are famous in Venezuela and have quite a history; they are native from Los Teques, a city in Miranda state and there are many theories of their origins. But what it's fact is that they are a must in partys, weddings, christenings, birthdays, etc. It is also a fact that Venezuelans love to go to birthday parties and such only to have cake and tequeños, it's funny, you often hear:
"Where is the dude with the Tequeños"
It is by far the best finger food of choice for us. And you have other options to get them alternative to going to parties and waiting for the "Tequeño Dude".
The first choice is buying them, yes, even with the current situation we have here, and the illusion that is our country's improvement, buying them on a supermarket or small businesses on your town is a viable choice nowadays.
The second choice is of course, making them from scratch but, this can be tricky because, wrapping the little sticks is not that easy. Me, I rather making them myself as always, because I can control what I'm making and in the process I get to experiment new ways to improve the recipe.
The first time I made them it was a disaster, I didn't wrapped them well and all the cheese melted and burned in the hot oil. Many many years later I decided to give it another go but this time making my own recipe for the dough.
You see, traditionaly (well, like most recipes on Google) the dough requires eggs to give it elasticity and the signature bubbles of the tequeños.
My dough doesn't have eggs, nor salt. However, it has yeast, a little bit, and vegetable oil. This two ingredients gives the dough the elasticity it needs to make a good Tequeño. As for the salt, I took it out of the recipe because one time the cheese was too salty and the dough has sufficient salt, so the end result was an inedible tequeño.
For the dough you need to combine:
-All purpose flour
-Yeast
-Vegetable Oil
-Water
Knead it a little bit, until smooth, and let it rest for half an hour.
The cheese we use is Llanero Cheese or Creole Cheese. Its our signature cheese, a must in all Venezuelan tables, I can't explain why though, all I know is that is the kind of cheese we use and love to do so.
For those who can't get a hold on this cheese you can use mozzarella cheese. You just have to cut it into sticks as long and as thick as you want them to, keeping in mind the amount of dough you make.
Today I made two cups of flour for 250grams of cheese.
Then I rolled it out into a square and cut strips...
Here comes the tricky part, and sadly, I didn't take enough pictures to show you how I do it, so I'll try to explain.
You take one strip and flatten it with your rolling pin. Take one stick of cheese and put it on the left end of the strip in the middle. Then carefully start to roll the stick in the strip diagonally, like so...
When you get to the end of the stick, roll it to more times and seal it with the dough...That's it, repeat until you finish the dough and the cheese.
I got 25 tequeños medium and small size.
Now, the friying. The recipe stated that Tequeños are deep fried, but I don't do that because for one thing, I have to look out for my figure, nah that's bull.
Kidding a side, the dough absorbs the oil, and the dough already has oil in it, and the second thing is that oil is way to expensive for me to use half a liter on a batch of tequeños.
I use only 150ml of very hot oil, and turn them to cook and get that awesome brown color evenly...
They don't take too long to cook, and they don't last long on the tray neither.
That was my dinner with my mom and my sister.
I make them whenever I can afford to make them. Now that I have a grip on the wrapping and the dough it's quite easy and doesn't take to much time to make and it's worth it.
I was going to pair them with hot cocoa like last time but at the end I didn't feel like it, and mom didn't wanted cocoa either so, her wish is my command.
In the meantime, here's a sneak peek...
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This is 100% Original Content.
The Images were taken with my mom's old cellphone, a Yezz 4E, and I have permission to use them.
The First Image is from Unsplash and provided by this site.
See you net time.
✨✨Blessings✨✨
November 24th, 2021.
I have to say that nine times out of ten my cravings are fried chicken, pizza, and Chinese food. But your treats look delectable as well.