Champurrado

Stellar Sweets
Reach farther than flan to create dulces that shine

By Cheryl SooHoo
Contributing Writer, El Restaurante Mexicano
©2002 Maiden Name Press LLC

Quick-serve Mexican restaurants don't always venture into the dessert arena. The Taco Maker, headquartered in Ogden, Utah, is an exception.

On any given day, customers can find kitchen staff spreading apple and cherry filling made with whole chunks of fruit on 10-inch, hand-stretched tortillas. They roll the tortillas in burrito-like fashion, deep-fry and then roll them in cinnamon and sugar.

"We wanted to offer a product with a Mexican flair that would appeal to the American palate," Corbin Craig, The Taco Maker's director of operations, says of the 99-cent turnovers served at this 150-unit chain. The turnovers, Craig reports, have held their percentage, provided great margins, and – perhaps just as important – given the restaurant an edge over competitors who don't sell sweets. "Desserts are not rocket science. Offer a good product, don't complicate your back-of-the-house operation, and you should do well," Craig remarks.

It's advice Mexican restaurants in all segments should consider – especially since desserts increase check averages thanks not only to the sweets, but to the ancillary liquor and coffee sales that typically accompany dessert orders.

Many Hispanic dessert menus, when they exist at all, offer plain flan and deep-fried ice cream and nothing more. While those dulces have proven popular with diners (flan vies with tiramisu as an overall dessert favorite, according to a Burke Research Study cited on dessertexperts.com), there are other options that draw on the traditions of Mexico and other Latin countries.

"From Chile to Mexico, many Latin American countries have a simple dessert tradition of milk- and egg-based custards, fried dough items, and fresh fruits. Many of these recipes came from colonial Spain," explains Maricel Presilla, chef and part owner of Zafra, a 30-seat Pan-Latin restaurant in Hoboken, N.J. "Although we may spend more time on our savory dishes, desserts are still satisfying and important to us."

While nothing beats the ease and cost benefit of preparing flan (essentially eggs, milk and sugar cooked over the stovetop), this common custard – which Spaniards brought to the New World centuries ago – can be flavored and presented in ways to suit most any palate and any style restaurant. "Even though you are using basic ingredients, you can turn these types of desserts into something fantastic with more flavor than any complicated production. When I use vanilla, I use it lavishly," Presilla says. "No two flans or custards are ever the same." That philosophy is in evidence at Zafra, where Presilla whips up three types of flan: one infused with pure vanilla, another with Spanish hazelnuts and almond nougat (Flan De Turron), and a third sweetened with premium chocolate.

Latin chef Aaron Sanchez, owner of Paladar, a funky 70- seat Manhattan restaurant featuring Caribbean, Central, and South American cuisine, uses coconut milk, coconut cream and toasted coconut in his rendition of flan. "It is our most popular dessert offering. Similar to creme brulee, flan is familiar to people," says Sanchez, co-host of the Food Network's "Melting Pot" television show. "My dishwasher at Paladar actually makes the flan and gets excited when people order it. There is a lot of love that goes into our Coconut Flan."

Tropical fruits can infuse desserts with a "lite" Latin twist. Pastry chefs, in fact, are giving desserts "a decided Latin lilt" with mango, passion fruit, papaya, pineapple and bananas, a dessertexperts.com report on dining trends says.

One refreshing example: At Alamo Restaurant in New York City, customers can scoop up a fresh mango ice cream confection. It's prepared by scooping out the fruit of the mango, blending it with vanilla ice cream and vanilla liqueur, then packing the creamy mixture back in the mango "shell."

And in the past year, the Dallas, Texas-based On the Border restaurant chain has introduced fruit desserts to its menu, Beto Rodarte, culinary director, says.

On The Border offers a Key Lime Margarita Torte that features three layers of thin lemon sponge cake topped with key lime custard and finished with a rich whipped cream. The dish comes served in a pool of strawberry puree and drizzled with kiwi glace. A more mainstream choice: the cream-filled apple or strawberry chimichangas. The apple version comes inside a cinnamon and sugar tortilla, and the strawberry in a chocolate tortilla. Both are served with strawberry puree and vanilla ice cream.

There's no more popular dessert ingredient than chocolate. And thanks to its ties to Hispanic culture, it's the perfect ingredient with which to sweeten desserts and drinks on Mexican and Latin restaurant menus! Chocolate, after all, was considered a treasure, the food of the gods and an aphrodisiac, and was even used as currency in Mayan and Aztecan cultures, according to Beverly Cox and Martin Jacobs, authors of "Spirit of the Earth: Native Cooking from Latin America" (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2001).

Quetzalcoatl, a feathered serpent god, is credited with planting the first cocoa trees, which historians believe grew in Mexico and Central America. And the emperor Montezuma reportedly drank 50 goblets a day of chocoatl, a sacred beverage made from cocoa beans. New research shows Mayans were drinking some type of chocolate as early as 600 B.C., according to a study at the University of Texas.

Presilla, author of "The New Taste of Chocolate," (Ten Speed Press, 2001), takes advantage of chocolate's popularity and tradition by using it at her Zafra restaurant in flan, chocolate rice pudding, and in the hot chocolate drinks mixed with spices such as jasmine, coriander, cloves, and star anise she promotes year-round. And Aaron Sanchez of New York City's Paladar has created his version of hot chocolate – Champurrado.

Cakes, caramelly cajetas (also called dulce de leche) and puddings are other end-of-meal options Mexican restaurants can consider.

The increasingly popular tres leches cake – a traditional Nicaraguan white cake soaked with three kinds of milk (hence the name tres leches) – is starring at more and more restaurants nationwide. Douglas Rodriguez, author of "Nuevo Latino" and executive chef at New York City's Chicama and Pipa, and Alma de Cuba in Philadelphia, says his easy-to-prepare Banana Tres Leches is one of the best-selling desserts at his three restaurants. He also offers a chocolate and an apple tres leches.

Tres leches also gets star billing at Las Alamedas in Houston, Texas, manager Wendy Leshley reports. "It's very popular – we serve it with chocolate sauce and whipped cream," Leshley says.

Another crowd-pleaser at this eatery that features regional Mexican dishes: the Crepes de Cajeta served with a sprinkling of pecans, Leshley notes.

Customers who frequent Café Iguana in Singapore (yes, there are Mexican restaurants abroad!) clamor for the 77-seat restaurant's Ancho Chile Flourless Chocolate Cake served with a margarita cream sauce and housemade vanilla ice cream. "The authenticity of this item is debatable, but it does combine two pre-Columbian ingredients, chocolate and ancho chiles," chef/owner Dan Durkin says. "The marriage of these two items to a classic continental recipe results in one of the more winning combinations in contemporary Latin cuisine."

Freelance writer Cheryl SooHoo of Evanston, Ill., writes about food, business and other issues for trade and consumer publications nationwide.

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