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- Among the coveted dim sum items at Paradise Dynasty in Costa Mesa and Glendale are golden, flaky radish pastries.
- Tomas Saldaña never ate the pastries, filled with flavorful daikon radish, in his native Mexico. But he decided he had to learn to make them once he tried them.
- After six months’ training he is an expert at the pastries, which sell out nearly every day.
Tomas Saldaña started his job as a line cook more than three years ago at Costa Mesa’s Paradise Dynasty, the Singapore-based restaurant group best known for its xiao long bao. But it wasn’t the restaurant’s famous soup dumplings that most captured his imagination. The restaurant’s golden radish pastries, also known as turnip puffs, are what truly captivated him.
Delicate and flaky, the pastries filled with flavorful daikon radish were completely different from the cuisine he was used to eating in his native Mexico.
“I have to learn how to make this,” the 24-year-old from Santa Ana promised himself.
He did.
SERIES
Stories of often-overlooked restaurant workers making and serving our food.
It took Saldaña six months to master the art of making these whisper-thin dim sum creations. As former Times food columnist Lucas Kwan Peterson wrote of the radish pastries in 2023, “The delicate layers of dough almost disappear upon meeting the tongue, and the remaining blank slate of soft, savory radish pairs perfectly with the fruity, deeply brown-hued table vinegar.”
Saldaña is now an expert at making these labor-intensive pastries, which tend to sell out within an hour or two after lunch and dinner service begins. Only 200 to 300 are made every day.
Tomas Saldaña holds a plate of Paradise Dynasty’s golden radish pastries. Inside is a filling of flavorful daikon radish.
Tomas Saldaña makes one of the two doughs used to make Paradise Dynasty’s radish pastries. He won’t reveal the type of flour he uses.
On a recent Wednesday, Saldaña showed us some of the steps of his craft. First, he rolled and folded a long stretch of dough several times. Two separate doughs make these golden delicacies. He wouldn’t say what kind of flour is used, calling it “a secret.” But if you go online you can find other people’s recipes that call for a blend of all-purpose flour and pastry flour to make a water dough; a separate oil dough is often made with lard or butter added to pastry flour. The oil dough is usually placed on top of the water dough — similar to placing a flattened layer of butter on a rectangle of croissant dough — and then folded repeatedly.
In the Paradise Dynasty kitchen, Saldaña folded the dough into something resembling an accordion, before seemingly packaging it all up into itself before folding the dough some more to make the layers that give the pastries their flaky appearance and texture. Next, he cut the dough into smaller pieces and filled them with stir-fried radish before closing them up, using egg whites to seal it together.
All the while, he was careful with the incredibly soft dough, gingerly handling it so that it wouldn’t tear.
Tomas Saldaña feeds the radish pastry dough into a pastry machine. Saldaña then lays the stretched dough on the work surface and begins the process of rolling and folding.
Saldaña weighed each individual pastry piece.
The hardest part is mastering the fold because the dough tends to stick to fingers. After it’s gently deep fried until the dough turns golden, it’s the folds that give the savory pastries its distinct look, something akin to voluptuous caterpillars, each intricately segmented.
The dainty pastries are served as triplets. Steam emerges when you open each one. The fine layers of crisp dough seem to melt on the mouth, revealing a flavorful and soft radish.
Saldaña said he can make about 100 pieces a day. He’s one of a handful of workers who know how to make the golden treat. He earns $22 an hour and gets portioned-out tips on top of that.
Thomas Saldaña measures out the filling and dough for Paradise Dynasty’s radish pastries then shapes them.
Before he joined Paradise Dynasty, Saldaña worked as a gardener but knew someone at the restaurant who then offered him a job.
Originally from Zumpahuacán in Mexico state, his mother taught him how to cook his favorites — enchiladas, tostadas and all sorts of seafood.
Saldaña, who is most dominant in Spanish, speaks English but he doesn’t understand much Mandarin — aside from “How are you?”
His supervisor doesn’t understand or speak Spanish.
Mostly they speak to each other in a little bit of English. Sometimes they resort to Google translate on their phones. Other times they use hand signs.
“We manage to find a way to communicate,” he said.
Eventually, Saldaña said, he’d like to return to Mexico and start a restaurant with food similar to what he makes now. He thinks the radish pastry would be a hit.
