Hey Local Guides!
I came here today to talk about other brazilian food: PASTEL.
Pastel is a kind of salty pastry very common in entire Brazil. This dought I bought but is very simple to cook it. It’s made basically of flour, egg and oil (and cachaça, to be more crispy - but is not essencial).
It’s one of favorites and usual fast-foods here.
It’s similiar to indian salmosas, argentinian empadas, chinese spring rolls and italian fogazza.
And is the same word to ‘cake’, in spanish!
Normally they sell it in 3 sizes (small, medium and lange) and a big dought that you can cut what size do you want to.
I chose the medium. It came dought circles between plastic, to make not to stick to each other.
You take one, put what you want inside - sweet or salt - close it, press with a fork (like in the image below) and fry it.
You need to do this thing with a fork to be sure that will be close (and is also a characteristics from this food). And need to pass a little bit of water on the edges (can /should be with your finger) to the dought fix it.
(You take of the plastic after to close it - will be in one size - because is easier to close it)
Here are my ingredients. I made a mix, making each pastel unique. I also like to eat just the fry dought, with no filling.
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Salt options: Tomato sauce, oregano, curry, mozzarela, vegan cheese (made of cashew nut), shimeji mushroom, onion and olives.
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Sweet options: Banana with cinnamon (you can add cheese too) , white chocolate or cheese (mozzarela or vegan) with goiabada (guava sweet - a tradicional sweet from Brazil).
The pastel, as we know it today in Brazil, originated in the 1940s through the descendants of Japanese immigrants in Santos, in the State of São Paulo as an adaptation of the spring rolls and the Chinese cuisine and Japanese cuisine guidelines, which they adapted the original recipe for spring rolls to the ingredients they had available in Brazil, replacing ingredients such as sake with cachaça. According to some versions, Japanese immigrants, during the Second World War, spread the dish, opening pastries in order to pass themselves off as Chinese to get rid of the discrimination that existed at the time because of the war.
The recipe quickly spread to São Paulo and later to the rest of the country, being still in the 1940s, one of the most consumed foods in the State of São Paulo, being sold both in open markets and in pastry shops. In the 1950s, the custom of eating pastries arrived in Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte (my city!)
In the 1960s, the custom spread to the south of the country, and in 1962 the first pastry shop in the city of Maringá was founded, spreading the custom to Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina during the 1970s, when creates the first pastelaria (pastel shop) in Blumenau.
(History took from Wikipedia)
The most typical are Meat Pastel, Banana Pastel or Cheese Pastel (sometimes we called ‘Pastel de vento’ (Wild Pastel) because the cheese melt and when you bit is nothing inside that you can see.
We also have a baked version, but is with other type of dought.
Other thing very common is to drink caldo de cana (cane juice) when you’re eating pastel. But I’ll talk about it in another post!
Hope you enjoy it!
Take care 
