Meals Without Borders: Pan con Chumpe

The turkey is a must-have item at most people’s Thanksgiving tables, but it’s also the that doesn’t get much love. My experience with baked turkey is that I’m constantly finding different ways to add moisture to it, whether it be gravy or the juice that sits at the bottom of the pan.

Luckily the bird I made and writing about doesn’t lack moisture. It’s the juiciest out there. The dish is called pan con pavo (bread with turkey) or pan con chumpe (chumpe = slang for turkey) and it comes from my mother’s home country of El Salvador.

The key to chumpe is the allocated time, patience, and effort put towards preparing the bird for roasting. This is not your grandma’s butter turkey. Literally nothing like it. The other critical component to savory chumpe is the relajo salsa that is continuously poured over the turkey while it’s roasts in the oven, and then once more as topping before it hits your lips.

Relajo salvadoreño can either make or break your turkey and it bids multiple rounds of trial and error to perfect. Once the roma tomatoes, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, chiles, Worcestershire sauce, and garlic gloves (along with other spices) are processed and warmed over a stove top, the goal is to dress your pan con chumpe sandwich so that the sauce is dripping off the sides. No exaggeration.

This dish also requires a thorough grocery run, ideally a store that specializes in Latin foods. American cuisine doesn’t typically link oranges, prunes, capers, onions, and olives with a traditional turkey… but with pavo salvadoreño, this is where the marinating magic happens. For garnishing: cucumbers, radishes, cabbage, carrots along with soft sandwich rolls complete the dish for a mouth punch of zesty, zingy flavor.

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What is neat about this particular cooking experience is that it was prepared and served by second generation immigrants: me, my cousins, and my tio and tia. We relied on a recipe we found online and our mothers’ and grandmother’s wisdom to accomplish such a heavy task. With an apartment full of Salvis, limited counter space, a few missing ingredients and a lot of improvising,  the end result was our own interpretation of a traditional recipe we grew up on. The outcome: everybody took some excess food home – it was too tasty to pass up.

Chumpe on Salvadorian-American dining tables may just be a meal to consume to most but I tend to believe it’s a little more symbolic. What chumpe salvadoreño really is for Salvis in the U.S. is the juxtaposition of a people who take pride in their roots, their culture, and their cuisine and simultaneously acknowledge the privilege it is to be an American citizen, naturalized or U.S.-born.

Of the many negative and largely false things that can and have been said about El Salvador and Salvadorians, our Savi turkey isn’t one of them.

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 For instructions on how to make this rendition of pan con chumpe, please visit international recipe website, Whats4Eats. Salvadorian chumpe is usually served during special occasional, family gatherings or parties, or major holidays such as Christmas and New Years. 

**At the point these sandwiches were made (mid-October 2019), turkeys were not in season so I substituted the turkeys for two whole chickens. REMEMBER: it’s not the type of bird, but the rejalo.