Tavira Puff Pastries
Also known as: Folded Cakes
Strips of puff pastry coiled and bathed in syrup — a convent sweet that Tavira never let slip away.
- Origin
- 16th century · convent of nuns at Largo da Atalaia, Tavira
- Region
- Tavira
- Season
- Year-round
Folhados de Tavira are rounded cakes of puff pastry cut into strips and coiled around a wooden dowel to form a small cylinder roughly ten centimetres across and seven to eight centimetres tall. Once baked until golden and crisp, they are plunged into a sugar syrup brought to the pearl stage, which gives them their characteristic gloss and sweetness.
To the eye, they are a spiral of very fine leaves, gilded at the tips and glazed by the syrup. To the tongue, they shatter into crunchy shards that dissolve and re-bind through the sugar — dry within, lustrous without.
Traditionally wrapped in cellophane, they are eaten throughout the day with a coffee or a tea, just as they were bought singly over the counter for generations.
- Flour
- Margarine
- Lard
- Eggs
- Baker's yeast
- Milk
- Sugar
- Water
Crisp and light, the puff pastry shattering into fine layers; the pearl-stage syrup wraps it all in a bright, intense sweetness, with no heavy cream or filling to weigh it down.
It is a sweet of very fixed recipe, tied to a single historic maker, so it admits few variations; some home and bakery versions adjust the syrup or the balance of fats, but the coiled shape and the sugar bath stay constant.
They are found above all at Pastelaria Gardy in Faro, where the Dias family still makes them daily; in Tavira and across the Algarve they turn up in pastry shops and traditional sweet fairs.
They call for a strong coffee or an espresso to cut the sweetness; a plain tea or a glass of Algarve wine also make fine company.
According to oral tradition, the recipe was born in a convent of nuns established at Largo da Atalaia in Tavira, founded in 1509 and suppressed in 1862 — placing Folhados de Tavira in the long lineage of Portuguese convent confectionery, made of eggs, sugar and pastry worked with patience.
For a long time they were sold only in Tavira, at the Café Cunha, which opened in the early 20th century and has since disappeared; the owner herself made them, and it was the regular customers who gave them the name "Folhados de Tavira", when they had previously been called simply "Bolos Folhados". The recipe has come down to the present day through the Dias family, who preserved it and continue to produce them at Pastelaria Gardy in Faro.
Sources: tradicional.dgadr.gov.pt · tradicional.dgadr.gov.pt · viagens.sapo.pt
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