
Since childhood, I was never on board the PB&J bandwagon. For me, the jelly is overly sweet and the peanut butter uncomfortably mouth-coating. But when I first took a bite of my newly preferred alternative—guava and cheese—my taste buds rejoiced.
“Guava and cheese is the Cuban peanut butter and jelly,” explains Ricardo Barreras, owner and chef behind Brooklyn’s Pilar Cuban Eatery. But I’m not afraid to scream it from the rooftops: Guava and cheese is entirely more delicious.
The salted, fatty cream cheese balances guava paste’s tropical, tangy sweetness. This fruity-creamy combo is popular in pastry cases across the U.S., from layered croissants to stuffed doughnuts, but the original G&C can be credited to Cuban snacking traditions that made their way to Cuban Miami bakeries. Cuban bakers in Miami then paired guava and cheese with buttery puff pastry, engineering the treat we know and love today: pastelitos de guayaba y queso.
Cuban chefs continue to innovate new, equally delicious applications of this sweet and salty duo. “I was told to reduce the number of guava desserts,” Barreras says. He didn’t. From a slice of guava-and-cheese pie to guava, cheese, and turkey sandwiches, Barreras’ culinary inventions mirror his own childhood memories of coming home from the local bakery with a box of sweet and savory pastelitos and pasteles. His love for guava runs so deep, he and his wife named their family boat “Guava Jelly.”
My personal love story originated not with a pastelito, but a nostalgic play on my own roots: a Southern biscuit sandwich. Zeb Stevenson, chef and co-owner of Redbird in Atlanta, hosts a menu of the flakiest biscuits that warrant lines out the door every Sunday. “People think the chicken biscuit is the star because we’re in the South, but we started biscuits with the guava-and-cheese in mind first.”
In his 20s, Stevenson’s dear friend shared cans of guava paste from care packages from her Cuban grandmother. Together, he and his friends made what they called “the poor man’s pastelito” by sandwiching guava and cream cheese between two slices of white bread. Decades later, Stevenson perfected his own G&C invention and now serves hundreds of Southern biscuits stuffed with guava paste, cream cheese, and house-milled cashew butter.
If you’ve yet to serendipitously taste a guava-and-cheese treat, it might be time to research a local Latin American or Cuban bakery. Or, make a pastelito de guyaba of your own. Guava paste can be found in most Latin American groceries or online. Simply enclose small slices of guava paste and cream cheese within squares of puff pastry dough, fold them into triangles, and bake till golden brown. Pro tip from Barreras: Brush a touch of simple syrup onto the baked pastries—pastelitos should always be shiny, he says.
Beyond pastelitos, might I recommend it in the form of Samantha Seneviratne’s melt-in-your-mouth guava and cheese rugelachs? Why not pour a vibrant, ruby-red guava glaze on your next cheesecake? And your classic vanilla cake is pretty much asking you to spread guava preserves in between the layers of cream cheese frosting and cake. So long as there’s guava and cheese, it’s bound to be delicious.
G&C > PB&J