A Lebanese pastry sits on the savoury menu of a Brazilian patisserie in central Christchurch, and not by accident. Stuffed Sfiha is $10 at our counter inside The Welder. Despite the name, it is one of the most Brazilian things we make.
How a Levantine pastry became Brazilian
Sfiha travelled to Brazil with Lebanese and Syrian families who settled there over generations. It did not stay a foreign dish for long. Brazil absorbed it, adjusted it, sold it on street corners. It turned into an ordinary snack. The sort of thing you buy without a second thought on the way somewhere else. Ask a Brazilian about sfiha and you get an answer about their own childhood, not about the Middle East.
That kind of quiet borrowing is the whole reason Dhi Ferrari's food is worth explaining to visitors. He trained at French and Italian culinary schools and grew up in Rio de Janeiro. Brazilian cooking is itself a record of everyone who arrived and stayed. A filled pastry with an Arabic name, made in a Christchurch kitchen by a chef from Rio, is a straightforward example. Not a curiosity.
What it sits beside
The sfiha belongs to a small, made-in-house savoury range, not a one-off. Four more sit at the same $10: a cheese and spring onion potato bread, a sausage scroll, a creamy chicken bread, a ham and cheese bread. Our three quiches line up beside them: the Lorraine, the mushroom and the caramelised onion, each $12. The Croque Monsieur from $18 is made to order.
The one to order next to the sfiha is the Brazilian cheese scone, better known as pao de queijo. Cassava instead of wheat, so it turns chewy where a scone would crumble. It arrives warm. Hand-whipped butter goes soft on contact, and there is guava jam. Guava turns up again in the Romeo and Juliet cheesecake, named for the Brazilian pairing of salty cheese and sweet guava paste. The cheese is Romeo. The guava is Juliet.
Come with someone and order across the board
A single savoury item is lunch. Four of them between two or three people is a savoury tasting, for about what two mains cost elsewhere in town. Take a sfiha, a cheese scone, a quiche and a potato bread. Put them in the middle of the table. Cut everything in half. Steam comes off the torn edges. Let three people work out which one they want the rest of. Our tables move and seat groups of four to eight. The kitchen is open-plan, so you can watch the work happening. Dogs are welcome, with a water bowl and tables with metal legs for clipping a lead to. Our piece on why we chose The Welder covers parking and the rest of the building.
The visit makes the point, not the pastry on its own. Bring a visitor here and you give them something to describe afterwards, which is what our kitchen is aiming at.
Quiches, cassava and the honest caveat
All three quiches and the cheese scone are made with no added gluten, and they sit in our No Added Gluten Cakes and Desserts collection alongside the sweet items. Two things to be clear about. New Zealand labelling rules let us state only that we have not added gluten-containing ingredients. We cannot make a claim about the finished item. And our kitchen is small and without exclusive production areas for all of our different recipes, so traces may occur and nothing we make is guaranteed safe for severe coeliac disease. The sfiha itself is not part of that group.
How to get your hands on one
Savouries are counter items. Walk in and take what is there, allowing around ten minutes for anything made to order. Need a set quantity held? Feeding a group? Order online instead, on the standard two-day lead time. The checkout date picker only offers dates the kitchen can meet. Savouries can also be supplied frozen, for heating at your own venue. Worth knowing if you are catering something yourself. The full menu lists everything currently running.
Collection only, from our patisserie inside The Welder at 20-26 Welles Street, Christchurch Central, one block south of the Bus Interchange. Doors open 10am to 9pm Tuesday to Saturday. Finish with a pudim and a coffee.
