Cuban pastry is a flaky pastry filled with sweet or savory ingredients, often served for breakfast or as a snack. The pastry crust is made with butter and folded several times, resulting in delicate layers. Traditional sweet fillings include guava paste or jelly, while savory options include ham, cheese, or picadillo. The pastries are brushed with sugar syrup before baking.
A Cuban pastry is a small filled pastry traditionally made with a flaky pastry crust and often described as resembling an American turnover. Eaten hot, when possible, and with coffee, they are a common breakfast or snack in the Cuban community. The fillings can be sweet or savory, and some, like guava paste or jelly, are traditional favorites. Cuban pastry can be made at home, but since flaky pastry takes a long time to make, most people buy them in bakeries. Pasteles is the Spanish word for cakes and the diminutive form, pastelitos, or “little cakes,” is the Cuban term for these sweets.
The puff pastry crust for Cuban pastry is usually made with butter. Several layers of dough and butter are folded together, rolled out, then folded over and rolled again. This process is repeated several times, with a period of chilling between each set of folding and rolling. Once cooked, the pastry puffs up into delicate flaky layers that brown nicely in the oven. Commercial frozen pats of prepared puff pastry are often substituted by home bakers, although if the frozen pats weren’t made with butter the flavor would be slightly different
Cuban pastry is always served in individual portions. Sometimes they are assembled and cooked this way and sometimes larger pieces are filled and cooked, then cut into the desired shape and size to be served. They can be round, rectangular, square, or triangular, and sometimes shape has a traditional relationship to fill.
Like turnovers, Cuban pastry can have any filling, but some fillings are definitely traditional. Guava jelly or paste, made from tropical guava fruit, is the classic filling for sweet Cuban pastries. Other traditional sweet fillings are guava jelly paired with cream cheese, sweetened coconut, and sweetened cream cheese. Less traditional options include apple, cherry, or anything that could be used to fill a pie. The pastries are brushed with sugar syrup before or during baking, which sweetens the crust a bit and helps it brown better.
Savory fillings can be ham, cheese, or various seasoned meat mixtures. Picadillo, a traditional Cuban meat dish made with ground beef, Creole sauce and tomato, pimento-stuffed olives, and raisins, is the most common meat filling. Savory pastries are also traditionally brushed with sugar syrup, which gives them a light sweet and savory flavor combination. The traditional shape for meat pies is round.
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