Filhoses de Abóbora (Portuguese Pumpkin Fritters)

Come Hanukkah I’m always looking for new things to fry. Filhoses de abóbora, also known as sonhos de abóbora or beilhoses, are a Portuguese Christmas tradition that sounded perfect, at least in Portuguese. Then I went looking for a recipe that used a can of pumpkin rather than a long pumpkin cooking and draining process. The problem with those recipes was that they used much, much more flour than doing it the hard way. For example, this handy PDF from the Portuguese Baking School uses more than four times more flour than pumpkin (by weight), while this “easy Portuguese recipe” uses the traditional trace of flour (24 times more pumpkin than flour).

Fortunately, I found a happy marriage of a can of pumpkin and a trace amount of flour on Facebook, and this recipe started with that. Thank you, Margaret, and your Portuguese kitchen. After I’d had it all figured out and was looking for the next thing to fry, I found a recipe for bimuelos, the Sephardic version of filhoses, also using canned pumpkin, and spiced it up based on that.

These come out more like deep-fried pumpkin pie balls than pumpkin-flavored donuts, so be warned (or try a high-flour version instead).

Makes: 36 small fritters

Ingredients

Dough

• 1 can (425g) pumpkin
• ¼ c. (43g) sugar
• 1 T. Triple sec (optional)
• 2 T. orange juice or milk
• zest of ½ orange (optional)
• 2 eggs
• 1 ⅛ c. (145g) flour
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• 2 tsp. cinnamon or pumpkin spice (optional)
• ½ tsp. gound coriander (optional)
• ¼ tsp. allspice (optional)
• dash salt (optional)

Nuts

• oil for frying
• superfine sugar and cinnamon to taste for rolling

Directions

1. Heat four inches of oil to 350°F.
2. Mix the flour, baking powder, and spices and set aside.
3. In a blender or KitchenAid, cream the rest of the dough ingredients.
4. If in a blender, move the dough to a bowl.
5. Gradually add the flour mixture while beating with a whisk or whisk attachment.
6. Drop the dough into the oil with a small scoop or two tablespoons.
7. Fry for about two minutes per side, turning them over once when the underside becomes golden brown.
8. When the other side is golden brown, remove to a rack or paper towels.
9. Roll in sugar.

Variants

The alcohol was supposed to be brandy. Port wine is also a popular choice.

Of course you can top them with powdered sugar instead. The cinnamon sugar isn’t necessary if you’ve added cinnamon to the dough.

You can shallow-fry them if you prefer. You can also turn them more frequently.

Some recipes are quite eggy with no other liquid, for example Filhoses de abóbora à moda de Trás-os-Montes.