Pasteles are a traditional dish prepared around Christmas in Puerto Rico, as well in other Latin American countries. Each country has a traditional recipe and method for making this dish. In Puerto Rico, our pasteles have as main ingredients root vegetables, especially green bananas. These vegetables are grated and mixed together to form a dough. The pasteles can be filled with pork (more traditional), and poultry. The process of making pasteles is a very lengthy one, and back pain inducing (in my opinion). My grandma made the best pasteles I’ve ever had. It is a shame that I never learned from her and to resort to a cooking book to learn.

My experience preparing these wonderful things was of course very pleasant. I started by preparing the poultry filling. I used approximately 5 lbs. of chicken. I prepared it as if stewing the meat and let it cook for 1 hr – 1½ hr. While the meat is cooking, I started peeling about 8-10 lbs. of vegetables. As I was reading the recipe, I must have been delusional and thought “all vegetables are like potatoes”. No, what we call yautia (taro root) is a vegetable very hard to peel and then it gets sticky, making the vegetable slip and then you’re peeling your hand (ouch!). Then you get to peel the green bananas and the plantain. Again, don’t be fooled. This is not like peeling a yellow Chiquita banana. You have to make slits around the banana and plantain, pry open the slits with the knife (very tricky, and of course skin abrasions will occur) and then peel it. You would think it is stuck with crazy glue. After peeling all the vegetables (the pumpkin is not so bad), you have to grate them. At this time, I must have had a lapse in stupidity because I obviated my food processor sitting in front of me and proceeded to grate all the root vegetables by hand with a hand grater, hmm. I filled an 11 gallon pot with the dough.

Now for the preparation, folding the pasteles is not as easy as it may seem. Some people say, “oh, is like wrapping a gift, no big deal”. It is a big deal for me. You should start by putting a parchment paper in front of you. Then, you pass the banana leaves, one at a time over the burner of an electric stove to buff them and place the banana leaf on top of the parchment paper. So far, so good. Then I spooned what may have been a lot of filling in the center of the banana leaf. At that point is when all hell breaks lose and things get out of control. You have to fold the thing into a rectangle and tie it with kitchen twines. There was dough coming out of every corner of that pastel. My back was killing and I made so much dough, I could not see the end of it.

The story has a happy ending though. I managed to get everything under control and made like over 40 pasteles in total. Needless to say, they were amorphous. Some were really long, others shorter, wider, well. The total preparation time was 8 bloody hours. As far as my boyfriend, he says he liked them, but I’m not sure. Of course, there were so many of them, he did eat them every time I served them. If after reading this, you are still interested in venturing with the pasteles, the following link provides step by step instructions and the recipe for pasteles.