Whole milk boiled with sugar creates a silky, smooth confection from Latin America called dulce de leche.
It’s like caramel, only smoother. The Spanish name literally means “sweet of milk.”
Maria Paz Moreno, 35, learned how to make it from her Chilean grandmother’s recipe and now dedicates a whole day almost every week to watching a pot of it slow simmer in her Easthampton kitchen. When it turns a chocolaty-brown, she knows it’s ready — typically after six hours. It’s a labor of love.
“In Latin America we don’t have frosting, we have this,” she says as she holds a pastry bag filled with dulce de leche in her kitchen.
A spoonful goes well with dark coffee, it complements ice cream and can even be spread on toast or a slice of apple, she says.
But mostly she makes this sweet stuff to go into her alfajores, cookies which are essentially a heap of dulce de leche pressed between two vanilla cookies and dipped in dark or white chocolate. Alfajores are wildly popular in many South American countries, and four years ago Moreno introduced them to western Massachusetts. Her business, Chilean Sweets, sells them to local establishments throughout the Pioneer Valley, like Cushman Market & Cafe in Amherst and Dobrá Tea in Northampton. She also caters and sells them online. Occasionally, she will sell bags of plain dulce de leche, but she mostly deals in cookies.
“One of my favorite parts is looking at people take their first bite of an alfajores. They are like ‘Oh, my God. I like this,’ ” she says.
Her home kitchen is a narrow space with a typical stove, oven, and barely enough space for one cook to move about. Business ebbs and flows, but at the busiest times of the year, typically around Valentine’s Day, she can churn out 600 cookies in a week. Depending on where you buy them, they sell for $2 to $3 a piece.
“My mission is that Americans know what alfajores are and they associate alfajores with me,” she says, as she stirs a pot of dark chocolate on the burner.
On this recent afternoon, she is halfway through the three-day marathon of creating a few hundred cookies to distribute to clients. The inch-thick cookies look deceptively like solid, chocolate cylinders.
On the countertops, rows of vanilla cookies she baked the day before are lined up. Alone they taste like a cross between shortbread cookies and vanilla wafers, light and not too sweet.
Moreno hovers over them, with both hands squeezing a pastry bag, leaving a dollop of the milk caramel on every other one. Somehow her black apron stays spotless.
Moreno grew up in Santiago, Chile. There she started baking at age 8, teaching herself from a children’s cookbook filled with simple recipes.
“I loved to cook. That was my book and I used it a lot,” she says. “I would usually make sweet things.”
The scones she made tasted delicious, she says, but they were hard as a rock. She served them to her parents: “I would make them eat them.” But, she recalls, they appreciated her efforts.
Moreno says she never thought that baking would turn into a career. When she graduated from high school, she went to business school, but didn’t like it. She dropped out to go to culinary school instead and pursued her passion for baking.
She came to the United States to do an internship at the Sunday River ski resort in Newry, Maine. There she met her husband, William Dupuis, 41, who was working as a cook.
When it came time for her to look for a job, however, she had to wait until her application for a green card, which would permit her to work here, was approved.
“The process of the green card was complicated,” she says. It took nine months, nearly twice as long as she anticipated.
As she waited, Moreno says, a lawyer told her that while she couldn’t yet work for someone else, she could be self-employed.
She started brainstorming.
The idea to sell cookies took root when she was invited to dinner at the home of an Argentinean friend. She decided to bring alfajores and contacted her grandmother for her recipe.
The cookies were a hit. “She loved them. Her husband loved them,” Moreno says of her friends.
After that, Moreno turned to the internet to see if anyone was selling alfajores in the United States. She found no one.
In Chile, she says, grocery stores often carry the pre-made cookies with bags of dulce de leche for people to assemble at home. Even there, people rarely make them themselves from scratch, she says.
Her joblessness was making her restless as her husband headed off to work each day.
“I was very bored, alone in my house, without work, so I started baking,” she says.
She started making alfajores for fun and her husband would bring them to the ski resort. Everyone seemed to love them, she says.
Encouraged, she approached a few nearby country stores to sell them and sold some to friends here and there, always keeping a supply in her purse.
“These cookies were a way to keep me attached to home when I was so far away,” she says.
Four years ago, Moreno and her husband decided to move to Easthampton to be closer to Dupuis’ hometown, Belchertown, and to start a family,
Once here, she began selling her cookies at farmers markets and lining up retailers to carry them.
To run her wholesale business from her home, she needed to get a permit from the state and her kitchen had to pass a health inspection.
She also designed the label on the packaging, which has gone through a few evolutions. It started with a sticker of Chile’s national flower, the lapageria, before she swapped it with a graphic of the Andes mountains. The tissue paper makes the individually wrapped cookies look a bit like artisan soaps.
After four years of running the business and, now, holding a green card, she applied to be a permanent citizen last year.
“I have family and friends here and it has become my home, not just where I live,” she says.
Her grandmother, who is 87, visited not long ago and was happy to see how her granddaughter is using her old recipe to bake alfajores commercially.
“She loved them, but she is my grandmother, she would be proud even if I made pasta for dinner,” says Moreno.
At some point, Moreno, who now has three children ranging in age from 3 months to 6 years, would like to expand her business out of her home and hire employees — maybe once her youngest, William, is in preschool. But now she is busy enough as she and her husband, who works as the executive chef at Hotel Northampton, juggling caring for the children and work.
“I basically bake when they sleep,” she says.
But her husband’s support, she says, has been key.
“I would not be able to bake or do anything without my husband. He is a very supportive husband and a wonderful father,” she says. “He is the most wonderful partner I could ever ask for.”
Her dream is to see her cookies catch on across the United States one day.
“It would be amazing for people to go to the grocery store and there they are — in Oklahoma.”
Lisa Spear can be reached at Lspear@gazettenet.com.
To order from Chilean Sweets, visit www.etsy.com/shop/chileansweets or call 512-3051.
Chilean Sweets are sold in Northampton stores including Cooper’s Corner, Dobrá Tea, Provisions, Heavenly Chocolate in Thornes Marketplace and State Street Fruit Store.
Other retailers: Millstone Farm Market in Sunderland, Cushman Market & Cafe in Amherst, and the Ecuador Andino Store in Hadley.