Pan Dulce: A Mexican Way Of Life

Mexicans love their pan dulce (sweet bread), usually washed down with a full glass of milk, coffee or hot chocolate. Morning, afternoon or evening, these pastries adorn nearly every table at every friendly gathering. Some foreigners find Mexican pan dulce too dry, too heavy, too bland, too crumbly – complaints about them abound. But no matter how you feel, it's hard to resist that marvelous smell of freshly baked dough luring you into your local panaderia (bakery). Before you know it, you find yourself loading up a tray full of pan you can't hope to polish off; without the faintest idea of their contents or names.

Not knowing what to expect from your purchase can be half the fun of the adventure, but for those who are curious about how Mexican pastries got their start and their character, the following is a brief guide:
The Spanish brought the tradition of wheat-flour pastries with them to the new world. According to the "Diccionario Enciclopedico de Gastronomia Mexicana," by Ricardo Muñiz Zurita, it was clergymen and women who first started baking pastries in Mexico, teaching their techniques to indigenous bakers, who quickly turned them into popular artisanry, experimenting with shapes, textures, and flavors. Pan dulce became integral to Mexican identity. Muñiz wrote, "Bread, for Mexicans, is not only nourishment, it is a fundamental part of the culture, and the sheer variety is proof of that."

Many of the same colonial recipes and methods are employed for the bread you find on sale today. However, Muñiz says it wasn't until the 1940s that daily trips to buy pastries at the corner panaderia became a widespread ritual. Over the years, pastries from around the world have influenced consumer demand, and it is quite common to find Danishes and U.S.-style fruit pies amongst the more traditional conchas and bisquetes.

There are several types of masa (dough) used for sweet bread. Masa de bizcocho is heavy on flour and sugar and is used especially for orejas, donas (doughnuts), and campechanas. Masa de manteca is lard heavy, not very sweet, and is used for rock-like cookies such as marranitos and piedras. Masa de panque, used for molded, spongy breads, has more sugar, butter, and egg. Most filled pastries, like empandadas, use masa fiete, while masa de gendarme is used for most cookies.

Here's a listing of the most common pan dulces:
Bandera: Light and flaky pastry baked in long strips. Sometimes sprinkled with powdered sugar.
Mantecada: Muffin-like spongy bread, heavy on the butter. Common flavor variations are vanilla and chocolate, often lightly sprinkled with nuts.
Concha: Perhaps the most iconic Mexican pastry, the crackled sugar coating resembles a seashell. Often dyed bright pink or yellow.
Cuerno: Named for their shape of a horn, often molded into neat little half-circles. The texture can range from buttery to dry, from light to heavy.
Empanada: Triangular or Half-moon shaped, traditionally filled with fruit preserves or pudding.
Oreja: Ear-shaped or heart-shaped, depending on how you look at it. Thin, flaky pastry, sometimes covered with a thin glaze.
Piedra: Heavy roll, often made with whole-wheat flour or oats, sometimes includes raisins and nuts.
Danes: Mexican version of the classic Danish pastry, lightly coated with butter and often includes a jelly center.
Bisquet: Biscuit, not usually very sweet, can range in texture from light to dense. Sometimes spruced up with chopped nuts or raisins.
Rol: If prepared correctly, should have spongy texture and a syrup made of honey or piloncillo wrapped in its coils. Sometimes it has cinnamon, and/or sugar glaze.

The Sour-tasting Bread & The Belgian Connection

'Nestor Pirrot with Guadalajara's famed birrote bread – created by his virtual namesake, Camille Pirrote, during the French occupation of Mexico.' - Photo By J. Hepp

In 1949, 22-year-old Nestor Pirrot came across a peculiar magazine. Although he had just returned to Belgium from military service in the Congo, the stories about La Malinche, Chichen Itza and Cortez in the tiny bi-weekly magazine about all things Mexico seemed more fantastic than anything he could have dreamed. Imagine his delight when he discovered the story of a sargeant in the French army with a last name strikingly similar to his own ... Camille Pirrotte.

"At that point I wasn't even dreaming that I'd be in Guadalajara one day," says Pirrot, who has now been living here for 28 years. His penchant for languages – French, Spanish, Dutch, German, Portugues, Italian, and English – allowed him to travel to the corners of the earth with his engineering job. After experiencing places like Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Aruba and Buenos Aires, he was finally assigned to a post here in Guadalajara.
Throughout all his travels, Nestor Pirrot never completely forgot about his countryman, Sargeant Pirrote.

"When I arrived in Guadalajara I read several articles on the subject," says Pirrot. "Some of them were pretty close to reality, but some of them were wrong, so I decided to do more of my own research."

Over the years he read what he could about the man responsible for bringing the famous birrote bread to Guadalajara. In his research he discovered that, although they are not directly related, they both came from Verviers, a small town in the French-speaking region of Belgium. He was also able to put together a pretty solid story.

On January 6, 1864, Camille Pirrote, a Belgian volunteer in the French Army arrived in Guadalajara just in time for the occupation of the city.

Thanks to a not-so-brilliant move by Napoleon Bonaparte, Mexico was under French control with an Austrian emperor, Maximilian I. Part of the emperor's grand scheme to win over the hearts of the Mexican people was to enlist the troops in teaching French culture and customs. Maximilian would later meet death by firing squad, but Mexico was bequeathed bread, mariachis and fine furniture.

Camille Pirrote was charged with teaching the locals to make French bread, but not long after he set up shop in a house near avenidas Vallarta and Juarez, he realized that he couldn't find yeast anywhere in the city. He improvised and left the dough out to ferment for a few days, which turned out to be a fine substitute. He began to give away day-old pieces of baked bread to the growing legions of poor in the city and the crusty slightly sour-tasting bread took the city by storm.

When the French were finally ousted in 1867, soldiers were given the option of returning home or maintaining residence in Mexico. Pirotte caught wind of the news of a passenger ship that was scheduled to make a special stop in San Jeronimo to pick up French and Belgian soldiers before rounding South America and heading back to Europe. He made the trip to San Jeronimo, but the ship never did. Disheartened but not defeated, Pirotte moved back to Guadalajara and opened up his own bread shop. He eventually married a Tapatia and took her last name, Garcia. And that, according to Nestor Pirot, is the reason why Camille Pirotte disappeared into relative obscurity.

At some point – Nestor Pirot hasn't quite worked out this detail yet –Pirrote turned into Birote, and now the bread is the essential ingredient for one of Guadalajara's most famous dishes, the torta ahogada.
There are many different versions of this story. Most maintain that Birrote was French and some say he was actually Maximilian's palace baker, but Nestor Pirrot will likely stick to his own version.

"I'm not a historian or a researcher. I'm an engineer," Pirrot says. "I do have to recognize that my interest in learning is due to the fact that our names were the same."

Homemade Mexico Cheeses: A Cornucopia Of Delicious Tastes And Textures

After those indispensable basic items of this republic's cuisine, tortillas, chiles and beans, the most important staple of the Mexican kitchen is queso – cheese.

Hernan Cortez conquered the Mexica (Aztec) capital of Tenochtitlan in 1522, and by 1527-28, the conquistadores were introducing cattle into Mexico.
Spain historically was renowned for its cheeses, and the indigenous inhabitants of what abruptly had become Nueva España quickly learned how to make a variety of quesos, which fit exquisitely with their native cuisine. It now is impossible to think of the soups, certainly of the antojitos and tamales of Mexico, without thinking of cheese.

The variety of Mexican cheeses is extensive, many of them mirroring the most flavorsome of Europe. Among the cheeses that are most widely well-known, produced and appreciated here are asadero, queso fresco, panela, quesillo de Oaxaca, manchego, añejo and Chihuahua.
The most delicious of these, of course, are not commercially manufactured but are hand-made at local farms and ranches.
Queso fresco, asadero and panela are the mainstays of most cheese-making family ranches and farms surrounding Guad-alajara.
The most popular and widely used cheese in Jalisco is a fresh, white, crumbly variety called with rural plainness queso fresco. There are several commercially manufactured brands of this "fresh cheese," but they taste exactly like that term – manufactured – in contrast to the rich homemade product.
Queso fresco is ubiquitous here. It's the cheese you find garnishing your tacos, enchiladas, tostadas, chilaquiles and frijolitos refritos, as well as being used to fill chiles rellenos (stuffed peppers).
A pale, cream-colored, moist, crumbly soft cheese, it has a creamy, somewhat mild yet faintly piquant flavor. As its simple name implies, it is not aged, but made daily, and used within a day or two. It traditionally is produced with raw milk and, after clabbering, mashed in a metate (grinding stone). It usually is formed into round cakes by hand or bound in wooden hoops.
Panela is white and damp, salty and semisoft, and easily recognized by the distinctive textured surface that comes from the shallow round baskets in which it is set to drip overnight. Panela owes its popularity both to its gentle price in local public markets and its pleasantly mild, slightly brisk flavor. It usually carries less fat, for part of the cream is skimmed off the milk before it's heated.
It is superb served with refried beans and for the topping of tostadas. As one connoisseur of panela has said, "An astonishingly simple and delectable Mexican dessert consists of equal portions of sliced panela and ate de membrillo -- quince paste."
Some aficionados of panela believe this cheese is even more tasty after it is aged. This is achieved by wrapping it in cheese cloth (manta cielo), and letting it stand for a week or more.
As it ages, the texture grows firmer, the taste sharper and the color a buttery yellow. With a week of aging, panela melts especially well, making it ideal for queso fundido (cheese fondue).
Aging panela for about three weeks also can produce a delectable soft-center cheese. Like Camembert, this aged panela is tastiest when made with milk from cattle grazing on lots of green grass. Thus, the summer rainy season is the ideal time to try it.
Asadero is, literally, "boiler" queso. An aged cheese, it is made, like queso Oaxaca, by adding rennet to warm milk into which some soured milk has been added. When the curd is firm, it's cooked and stirred carefully, in the same direction, over a vigorous flame until tough, skeinlike curds form. These are broken off into lengths, wound into small balls and cooled. Asadero is rather similar to mozzarella in both taste and consistency. However, asadero is slightly softer in texture and sharper in taste.
The process of producing such homemade cheeses has changed only slightly since 1529, though the hygiene has improved greatly. Milk is heated and stirred until the watery whey separates from the curd. Rennet is added. This is the enzyme rennin, prepared from the lining of the fourth stomach of unweaned calves, and possessing the property of curdling milk. Commercially prepared today, it comes in the form of a quickly dissolving pill. (It also has been important in coagulating casein for plastics as well as in medical and pharmaceutical preparations.) This fresh curd (in the case of panela) is kneaded by hand, pressed through sieves and the cheese placed in small baskets and left to set overnight to drip off the remaining whey, then refrigerated.
This time-consuming process, tasting the heady flavors of freshly-made cheese, buttermilk cream and butter, constitutes not only a gourmet's delight, but helps put one in touch with life's basics in an edifying and important way. Like cultivating one's own vegetables or slaughtering one's own meat, such experiences address the fundamentals of the natural world, and help us get back into accord with the primal wisdom -- at once simple and complex -- of nature, of our root animal being.
But it can be if you're not careful.