Pastele is a usually it's brown in color.

It's probably about maybe six inches in length.

Now you see different pastele shops throughout the island, and still people selling off the road and for fundraisers.

It's something that they learn from Puerto Ricans.

They may not necessarily be Puerto Rican.

Not easy to make.

So when somebody makes them, everybody's like, Oh yeah, I want some of that.

ONO Hawaiʻi's Food Culture sponsored by Hawaii Gas and Aloha State Daily.

Pastele stew?

Mentura?

Of course, we have mentura, sir.

Why?

You like taste em?

Pasteles came with the original Puerto Ricans.

The word pastel in Spanish really implies a savory pastry or a sweet pastry.

Koti, owner of Wat Get Kitchen, has been serving pasteles since 2007.

Pasteles, as it is called in Hawaiʻi, is a local spin on Puerto Rican Pasteles.

So Pateles are made with a green banana.

You peel that and then you guage it, what the local Puerto Ricans call guaging to come up with a masa.

So the filling is a pork based filling.

The plantation Puerto Ricans and the local people call it mentura, which is a word that comes from the Spanish word mesclura.

You roll it out, you put your masa, your filling, your olive you make a good wish for it, and you put it down till you steam it.

You're going to steam it for an hour, and it's almost going to be the consistency of that edge of the fluffy pancake.

That consistency is a good pastele.

Depending on the thickness of it.

But we steam for about an hour to an hour and 15 minutes, and your pastele is ready.

Always let them rest for a few minutes.

Now, if you grew up in a family that boils them, it's quite all right, you can boil it, but over here, we steam it as we find out that it just gives you the right consistency and a really full flavor.

You're gonna have an olive, which a black olive for pasteles, a green olive for Puerto Rican Pasteles.

So that is a big difference.

We don't know green olives in Hawai'i at that time, so black olive always.

It's quite tasty.

It has its- it's like a comfort food for many.

This is a display board showing the path of the hurricane in 1899 and this is the main reason Puerto Ricans came here.

Many Puerto Rican immigrants fled their homes after an unprecedented disaster struck the island.

In 1899, there was a hurricane that went through Puerto Rico and destroyed most of the Southwest area, which was the heavy coffee growing area.

The homes were destroyed.

Everything.

1900, Hawaii became a territory of the United States.

And what was passed was the Organic Act, which eliminated all the master servant contracts that the plantations used.

So now individuals on the plantation were free to quit working, go anywhere they wanted, for better conditions.

Many individuals that left the plantations were then replaced with other ethnic groups, including Puerto Ricans.

First group arrived in December 23, 1900 and there were about 70 that came, and they went to Maui for the Pioneer Mill Sugar Plantation there.

Now, when it came to Hawaiʻi, of course, it was all these plantation people with all different languages, so pidgin took over, and the word pastele has evolved.

Never open a pastele when it first comes out of the fire, yeah, because it will crack.

Over the 100 plus year history of it.

I and I think most Puerto Ricans, local Puerto Ricans, insist of calling them pasteles.

When they came here.

It's like every other ethnic group, you know what you're used to in your home country.

You don't find here there.

They used the plantain.

Well here, you know, they didn't have plantain.

So, you know, the choice was Chinese banana, Chinese bananas, the variety or Williams bananas, the different spices and stuff like that.

They had to change.

What can you?

Filipino?

How come you eat this food?

How come you eat this food?

In Hawaiʻi, any kind of food, right?

For Koti, pasteles are more than a business.

They're memories Hot, yeah, be careful, sir.

Wat Get Kitchen happened as somebody's wish to have their own kitchen, we made that come true, and with the idea of making pasteles.

I am a hotel person.

I never wanted to make a pastele in my whole entire life, or even work in a kitchen, to be quite honest.

So when this person disappeared that I had opened it for, it was time for me to decide if I wanted to stay doing this or go back to my hotel world.

I was almost at the verge of saying that was enough, until one day when the three sisters walked in.

One of them had just had a stroke and could hardly talk.

They ordered a pastele and this woman began to cry, began to cry because the flavor reminded her of her grandmother's.

And that's when I realized that the mission was greater than me, so I needed to continue and try to perpetuate a very local plantation time recipe.

I mean, really, food is memories.

And what's a better thing to serve than memories?