Cuban pastelitos bring Miami to SoDo at La Ventanita Seattle
Packing to fly across the country is always a bit tricky. How many pairs of socks is enough and will it be 70 degrees one day and snow the next? But friends and family who flew to Seattle from Miami to visit Miriam Cortẽs had an especially difficult task packing. Cortẽs asked her guests to take Cuban pastelitos with them. She grew up eating these baked goods from the neighborhood bakeries and missed them dearly when she moved to Seattle. But when the pandemic hit and Cortẽs wasn’t expecting any visitors, she tried to make the pastry herself and ended up enjoying it for all of us at La Ventanita Seattle.
“During the pandemic, everyone really realized the importance of mental health and a lot of people, myself included, had depression,” Cortẽs said. “What really helped me when my husband had to go back to work was baking for him and his co-workers.”
With willing tasters, Cortẽs expanded her baking to include all of her childhood favorites and found that the Seattle community was just as obsessed with Cuban pastelitos as she was.
your favorite? The pastelito de queso is made with puff pastry flakes filled with sweet cream cheese and dusted with extra sugar for a delicious crunch.
“When I was young, cheese was always the first thing out of parties,” Cortẽs said. “Growing up, this was definitely my favorite because it has extra sugar on top.”
However, the most popular pastry at La Ventanita Seattle was the pastelito de carne. Combining ground beef with garlic, cumin, onion, and oregano gives it a thin sweet coating for the perfect sweet and savory treat. Cortẽs also wanted to feature one of her favorite fruits in La Ventanita’s pastelitos: guava.
“Guava is hard to find here in Seattle, but I missed it and it’s really great to see people getting into it too. Guava shows up in two La Ventanita treats: the Pastelito de Guayaba and the Pastelito de Guayaba y Queso, which pairs the fruit with sweet cream cheese. The menu always features these four staples, but also includes two rotating pastries each month.
Cortẽs grew up in Miami and would often enjoy these pastelitos with her family when they went to the corner bakery.
“A lot of bakeries in Miami have a walk-in window where you can just order either coffee or a pastry or sometimes even a sandwich, and they just bring it to the window,” Cortẽs said. “It’s a very collaborative thing and sometimes there would be a crowd outside that window and you could catch up on the day’s news or just chat with different people.”
La Ventanita translates to “little window” and gives Cortẽs a touch of home. “I hope that when you have a pastelito from La Ventanita Seattle, you feel that same connection to a community that may be far away but will always be my home,” she said.
La Ventanita is open to online orders through its website with local pickup at 1740 1st Ave S in Seattle’s SODO area. Pickup is on Saturday or Sunday between 10am and 12pm. Online orders close on Tuesday before pickup or when sold out. Keep an eye on La Ventanita Instagram for updates on upcoming market locations and dates.
Lauren Allain is a freelance writer for Seattle Refined. See more of her work here.