Argentinian Bakery Welcomes ‘The Smell of Home’
November 24, 2025
• A Needham cook-turned-baker recently started Pampa Bakery, an at-home pastry business, which has enabled her and other residents to connect with their culture through food.
Friday mornings for Juana Gonzalez Iniguez start at 3:45 a.m. From her Needham kitchen, she watches the sun slowly rise as she tends to her pastries, watching them golden in the oven, brushing them with egg wash and sugar and arranging her weekly orders neatly on the counter.
By the time her two children wake up for daycare, the house smells like a bakery. Chocolate chip cookies, scones and challah bread cool down on the counter, and Gonzalez Iniguez has finished three days of work on her medialunas, a sugary Argentinian croissant she coats in a homemade orange blossom simple syrup.
Out of the oven are also her bizcochitos de grasa, small Argentinian biscuits, and she gets out from the freezer her alfajores, two cookies sandwiching a dulce de leche filling.
It can all be especially tempting for a 2-year-old.
“Camilo all the time is like, ‘Medialunas? Medialunas?’” Gonzalez Iniguez said, referring to her older son. “And my husband is always like, ‘Man, I can’t believe I wake up to this smell and I can never eat any of it.’”
This morning, she set aside some scraps from the medialunas, twisting the dough into snail shapes they can enjoy later. Now, around noon, she waits for customers to stop to pick up their treats.
Pampa Bakery, which she launched in September, offers a welcome comfort and new culinary discovery, depending on the customer. Gonzalez Iniguez, who is originally from Argentina, said the business has forged connections among the local Argentinian community while also introducing new flavors to other residents.
One woman recently asked her “where were you the last 27 years that I’ve been living in the United States?” Another chatted with her in Spanish at her doorstep while grabbing an order.
“I love Argentina. I just, I miss it a lot, and for me, it’s a way of being closer,” Gonzalez Iniguez said. “I am also helping other Argentinians to feel a little home here.”
Making the medialunas takes time and patience. The dough first rests in the fridge for 12 hours, which is then folded into a block of butter to achieve thin layers — too warm, and the butter melts into the dough. After each fold, the dough goes back into the fridge to stay cool. Each batch is about 30 layers, she said.
“I think the thing that I like the most is I’ve been getting better and better at layering. They look so beautiful,” she said. She makes about five dozen every week.
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It’s a pastry she didn’t grow up making, as it was more of a “buy-them-in-a-bakery”-type treat, though a common sight at birthday parties were medialuna ham and cheese sandwiches, which she highly recommended.
She worked as a restaurant chef in Argentina and later in Santa Barbara, California. Starting a family made her rethink line cooking — working late shifts and standing on your feet for eight hours, while pregnant, didn’t seem ideal to her.
While the adrenaline rush of cooking is something she misses, Gonzalez Iniguez said she finds plenty to enjoy about baking. She’s always liked making bread and the satisfaction of kneading the dough, she said.
Before opening Pampa, she worked at Forge Baking Co. in Sommerville. She promised herself, once her youngest son started daycare, she could move on her dream of opening her own bakery.
Alongside her Argentinian pastries, she also makes challah, both to cater to a large Jewish contingent in Needham but also calling back to her roots. Argentina is home to a sizable Jewish population, the largest in South America, and her family is also Jewish.
The name Pampa refers to where she grew up.
“It’s a region, and it’s also the name of one of the provinces,” she said, “and in fact, I lived in La Pampa region.” The company branding also features blue and gold-yellow, which are colors on the Argentinian flag.
Her family from Argentina visited the states over the summer, where she tested out recipes for them to try, seeing as they would be the ultimate arbiters of authentic Argentinian pastries. Her mom will also be visiting over the holidays and have a chance to play taste tester.
During a Friday afternoon, after the hectic rush in the kitchen, Gonzalez Iniguez drank mate, an herbal tea, with her apron still tied around her waist. Before moving to Needham just over two years ago, a big kitchen was a must-have. She now sits looking into the space, taking a moment to relax after an early start.
She said she hopes to one day open an artisan coffee shop, where she could share her pastries and those nostalgic aromas she experiences in her own home.
“Coming in and smelling the medialunas… It’s like going into a bakery,” she said. “It’s the smell of home.”
