A Taste of Tradition: Learning to Make My Mom's Signature Pastel

This week, I got the chance to learn how to make pastel from my mom. Pastel is a fried pastry snack typically filled with savory fillings from meatto vegetables. This is one of my mom’s signature snacks and she has been making it ever since I was a kid.

She first learned the recipe from a cooking book but overtime perfecting it by consulting local patissiers that she knew and people who sell snacks for a living. She eventually found the perfect recipe that resulted in smooth crispy skin but also savory filling that complements each other.

This is actually not a rocket science kind of cooking. Anyone with an egg, flour and water could make these simple snacks. The difference lies in the filling but also the taste of the crispy pastry that wraps the filling.

Let's share her secret with y'all!

All you need is 250 flour, 50 gr of margarine, one egg yolk, and water as needed. You have to mix all that to create the dough that has a slightly sticky consistency. It shouldn’t be too dry either. As you get the dough, you have to divide it to the size of your preference.

This time, because we only have Japchae, that’s what we used as a filling. Typically you would add boiled egg inside the wrappings. My mom usually makes carrot with flour mix for the mixture but since this was for fun and for my meal, we just filled it with Japchae.

To make the shape that looks like italian styled Calzone, you have to flatten the dough, put the filling and put them together. Then, make a little pinch and twist on the corners of them. This is the part where patience is needed, you can’t really rush this process or they won’t look as aesthetic as they should. They should look as below and they are ready to be fried.

You don’t really need too much oil to deep fry them. If you get them outside around here, they are typically extremely deep fried and I am not a fan.

This is a very simple recipe but what makes it delicious was certainly the technique, the crafts and the passion that my mom had for snacks. When I replicated this simple recipe, it was definitely the experience that was missing 😀as it was the very first time in many years I learned to properly make them rather than just helping from the sideline. I messed up some of the shapes and even went my own way to make these type of shapes before I could make nicer shapes of them.

As they are done with frying, I can’t stop eating them. Since I ate 10 piece of them and that was already almost 1300, I decided it was my meal of the day and I ate nothing else 😂