Ensaïmada

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Ensaïmades

The Mallorcan ensaïmada is a pastry product with great tradition on the island, which has been continuously made and eaten on Mallorca for a very long time. We find the first written references to the Mallorcan ensaïmada as early as the 17th century. At that time, although wheat flour was mainly used for making bread, there is evidence that this typical pastry product was made for festivals and celebrations.

The "ensaïmada de Mallorca" is made with strong flour, water, sugar, eggs, mother dough and pork lard. The handmade character of the product makes it difficult to give an exact formula, so scales have been established defining the proportion of each ingredient, giving rise to an excellent quality traditional product. The name comes from the Arabic word "saïm", which means pork lard.

A variant of the ensaimada is made with the stringy orange strands found inside pumpkins (translated from Spanish as angel hair) which is cooked with sugar to make a sweet filling that is rolled inside the dough.

In the Philippines, a Spanish colony for nearly 400 years, the Mallorcan ensaimada has evolved over the centuries into a rather unusual variation, commonly spelled ensaymada in Tagalog, that is made with butter instead of lard and topped with grated cheese (usually aged Edam, known locally as "queso de bola") and sugar. It is much richer than the Mallorcan original and is extremely popular throughout the islands, especially during the Christmas season. It is often, though not always, eaten with hot chocolate.