Meet Our Vendors: Selva Central Goods

Mayra ran a painted glass artwork business before her baked goods started taking off

Mayra Sibrian is the owner, creative, and baker behind Selva Central Goods. Running the small business entirely on her own, Mayra will often wake up anywhere from 2 to 4 am to start baking, to ensure that every item she sells is baked fresh that day.  

She grew up in Southern California but has been in Seattle for the past seven years. In Southern California, Mayra grew up around Latinx community, but when she moved to Seattle, she noticed that the Latinx community was much smaller and less prominent than where she grew up. Instead of feeling discouraged by this, Mayra saw it as an opportunity to have more room to create. She noticed that even though there were a few pan dulce (sweet bread) options available, they were mainly traditionally Mexican and didn’t represent other countries in Central America.  

Mayra’s father is from El Salvador and her mother is from Mexico, so she grew up eating food from both cultures. She wanted to expand people’s ideas of what pan dulce and other foods could be by introducing them to food from countries like El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, to name a few.  

Selva Central Goods strikes a balance between traditional recipes and also using seasonal and local ingredients that Mayra finds in the Pacific Northwest. Mayra believes that using seasonal and local ingredients actually keeps the recipes close to their traditional roots, even if the ingredients themselves are different, “The ancestral way is to use what’s in season from the land,” she says.  

Mayra’s semitas are pastries filled with a guava hibiscus chia jam

In addition to the pan dulce, Mayra also makes baked goods like puerquitos (pig-shaped ginger cookies), semitas (kind of like a pie crust sandwich with sweet filling), and Salvadoran quesadillas, which are very different from the flour tortilla and cheese dish from Mexico. Salvadoran quesadillas are a pound cake made with a blend of white cheeses. Mayra says they’re sweet and savory in the same way corn bread is sweet and savory. The quesadillas are the one thing Mayra makes that is a traditional family recipe that her mother made for her growing up.  

When she was first starting Selva Central Goods, people would tell Mayra that her baked goods were “unusual,” “different,” or “exotic,” but she explains that even though some of the ingredients or the names might be unfamiliar people, the process and concept of the pastries have more in common with familiar Euro-centric baked goods than people realize. Her hope is that her baked goods can be a delicious and fun way to educate people about other cultures. 

You can find Mayra and her baked goods at the Columbia City Farmers Market on Wednesdays from 3-7.