Salteñas

Type	Empanada
Place of origin	Bolivia
Main ingredients	Beef, pork or chicken
Media: Salteñas

Inside of a salteña, featuring its sweety, mildly spicy sauce

A salteña is a type of baked empanada from Bolivia.

Salteñas are savory pastries filled with beef, pork or chicken mixed in a sweet, slightly spicy sauce containing olives, raisins, potatoes and sometimes egg. Vegetarian salteñas are sometimes available at certain restaurants.^[1]

Typically salteñas can be found in any town or city throughout the country, but each area has its variations; Cochabamba and Sucre claim to have the best version of this snack, and many will go out of their way to try the variation from Potosí. In La Paz and Santa Cruz de la Sierra, it is a tradition to enjoy salteñas as a mid-morning snack especially on sundays, although vendors often start selling salteñas very early in the morning. The pastries are sold anywhere from 7am to noon; most vendors sell out by mid-morning.

History

Historian Antonio Paredes Candia states that during the early 19th century, Juana Manuela Gorriti was the first person to create the current version of this dish. This lady later married President Manuel Isidoro Belzu. Gorriti was born in Salta, Argentina and was exiled to Potosí, Bolivia during the Juan Manuel de Rosas dictatorship. The Gorriti family endured extreme poverty, and they came up with the recipe in the early 19th century in order to make a living. A variation of these pastries was known at the time throughout most of Europe.

The product, nicknamed salteña, became very popular. Candia states that it was common to say to kids: "Ve y recoge una empanada de la salteña" ("go and pick up an empanada from the woman from Salta"). In time most forgot the name Juana Manuela Gorriti, but not the nickname of her tasty snack, which eventually became a Bolivian tradition.

Consumption

Salteñas are juicy, like a stew in a pastry. The juiciness is achieved by making a stew out of all the ingredients and adding gelatin, so that the stew hardens in the refrigerator, and then slowly melts when they are baked. This ensures that the dough does not get soggy even while providing a very juicy filling. They are more football-shaped than flat like empanadas. The trick to eating them is to hold them upright, nibble the top corner and work your way down without spilling any of the hot juices. Llajua (Bolivian salsa) complements it well.

See also

• Bolivian cuisine
• Pasty
• Xiaolongbao, another dumpling with a gelatin-based liquid filling

References