Street Fair · Fried Pastry
Pastel de Feira
Photo: Avelludo / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
The thin-crust São Paulo pastel traces back to Japanese and Chinese immigrant vendors who ran the city's open-air 'feiras livres' and adapted their own fried-dumpling traditions into a much larger, stretched-dough version.
A large, paper-thin pastry filled with meat, cheese, or hearts of palm, deep-fried to order at street-fair stalls across São Paulo. It's stretched by hand right before frying so the shell blisters and crisps rather than staying doughy.
Why it's made this way: São Paulo's weekly neighborhood feiras, built up by 20th-century Japanese immigrant vendors, made the pastel the city's signature fair food in a way no other Brazilian city replicated at the same scale.
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Part of World of Street Food — 690 dishes from 118 countries.
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