Beautiful pan dulce | Lille Allen
Second-generation bakers are rethinking what pan dulce can be
Mayra Sibrian had a deceptively simple goal when she started Pan de la Selva in Seattle. “I wanted to highlight different styles of pan dulce that reflected both my Mexican and Salvadoran backgrounds,” she says. The California native grew up eating conchas and pan dulce with her family, and thought there was a way to blend the traditions of her childhood with the flavors of her Pacific Northwest community. For her, that looks like PB&J conchas or strawberry y queso picos, as well as a riff on the iconic pastry of Dia de los Muertos: pan de muerto. The pastry is made with totomoxtle (corn husk) ashes, and dusted with marigold. “Our pan mirrors the way communities of color hold on to our identities while adapting to new environments,” she says.
Your local bakery probably has its roots in France. Maybe Italy. Perhaps Scandinavia or Japan. But in the United States, bakers are increasingly applying real craft and attention to Mexican baked goods like conchas and a variety of pan dulce. Domes of soft, sweet bread with crunchy, sugary crusts appear in traditional flavors like vanilla and chocolate — and more experimental ones — marking a new era in which tradition and modernity converge. Across the country, bakeries and pop-ups, often helmed by members of the Mexican and Central American diasporas, are celebrating Mexican baking traditions and experimenting with flavors, creating a new world of Mexican American pastry.
Mexican baking traditions have often been linked to European colonization, with French brioche touted as the parent bread of the modern concha. But Sibrian says, “Mexican baking is a distinct art form deserving of appreciation in its own right. While there may be overlaps and innovative fusions with traditional Eurocentric pastries, I believe it is equally important for us as Mexican bakers to preserve the integrity of our traditional breads.”
Mexican baked goods in America have long lacked the same integrity as their sweet counterparts found in their origin country. Caroline Anders, who owns Atla’s Conchas in New York with her husband Mauricio Lopez Martinez, notes that in Mexico, you can more easily find conchas of higher quality, often handmade and baked in wood-fired ovens. Painstaking attention is given to the process: letting the dough rise, making sure the crackling top is the right consistency, and ensuring it’s baked evenly into a rich, almost brioche-like treat.
But in the U.S. “what a concha is, or historically has been, is cheap, affordable,” she says. “This is not necessarily a bad thing.” But think of the conchas at your local panadería, or in the plastic display case at the grocery store (if those even exist in your neighborhood), which often cost no more than a dollar. They are probably crumbly, dry, tasting of artificial vanilla and bitter food coloring, as a result of being mass-produced by a commercial bakery, or by an international conglomerate like Bimbo. “A lot of them are made using a mix, or else the absolute cheapest ingredients, oil instead of butter, white flour,” she says. “Usually the toppings are colorful because there’s food dyes, but there’s no flavor in the topping.” Non-Mexican Americans haven’t been interested in specialty Mexican pastries the way they have French croissants and baguettes, leading to a lacking representation of the richness of Mexican baking traditions.
At Atla’s, they use Martinez’s family’s recipes, Anders says the focus is on the quality ingredients used in Mexico. “We use vanilla, we use ground anise, and we make them with butter, not oil or shortening,” she says. “It’s not exactly the same as what you get in Mexico, but it’s much more akin to that.” They also focus on using full-inclusion flour, milled in-house with grains from local farms. That might not look like what much of American baking looks like today, with its focus on white flour, but it also may be closer to older traditions in both Mexico and the U.S.
A conchas boom is happening, and it’s because there’s been an “increase in first-generation Latinx bakers who are proudly showcasing their cultural roots through their creations,” says Sibrian. The ability to create pop-ups and garner a following on social media translates to a lower barrier of entry for showcasing baked goods. No longer do you have to work your way through a professional kitchen — likely in a restaurant that isn’t representative of your culture — before you get a shot at doing your own thing.
That’s what inspired Mariela Camacho when she began baking conchas in Seattle in 2017 after completing baking stints in French and New American kitchens. “I was really tired of it. I was angry that it was taking so much of my energy and my creativity, and I wasn’t really building a future for myself,” she says. In starting Comadre Panadería, which now has a permanent home in Austin, Texas, she wanted to “make food that I want to eat, that I miss, and that I hope can make other people feel good.” But she’s not hemmed in by tradition, allowing herself to be inspired by Texan ingredients like mesquite wood and prickly pears.
Courtesy of Comadre Panadería
At Comadre Panadería in Austin, pastry chef Mariela Camacho employs Texan ingredients like mesquite wood and prickly pears.
Most modern panaderías are taking flavor inspiration from other cuisines and traditions. Ximena Suarez of San Francisco’s Florecita Panadería began experimenting with conchas after quitting her marketing job in 2022, and from the beginning wanted to introduce non-traditional flavors, like chocolate chunk and strawberry hibiscus. “I didn’t want to do any artificial colors, so I experimented with things like matcha to get a really nice green color, but also it tastes good,” she says. “I was thinking through different pastries I’ve tried and thought, what if I did that, but in a Mexican type of pastry?”
Though Latinx people comprise 19 percent of the U.S.’s population, the prevalence of European-style pastry means that most Latinx bakers were already educated in European tradition by the time they began making pan dulce. “I taught myself to bake through books and practice, just out of curiosity. And that’s a lot of European-style bread, using sourdough as the only leavening agent,” says Arturo Enciso, founder of Gusto Bread in Long Beach, California. At Gusto Bread, Enciso combines the baking techniques he loves and the breads and sweets he grew up with, with a menu of traditional pan dulce and crusty, seeded loaves. “We’re not a Mexican panadería. We’re not a European bakery. We’re not French, we’re not Mexican. I’m Californian. And that’s kind of my lens.”
While a liberal approach to the possibilities of sweet bread flavors has undoubtedly captured a wider audience for conchas, there are other reasons why conchas and Mexican bakeries are getting more attention. Enciso credits the influence of modern panaderías in the popular tourist destination Mexico City — like Panadería Rosetta — with both inspiring bakers and giving traveling American customers a taste for pan dulce. And Suarez says the concha’s resemblance to Chinese pineapple buns and Japanese melonpan gives people another frame of reference. Suarez notes that she’s begun getting wholesale orders from cafes that don’t traditionally have Mexican clientele, where her conchas are displayed next to French pastries. “I feel like conchas were in their own space for a long time,” she says, “and I love to see that that’s changing.”
Indeed, customers who may not have grown up with conchas are now clamoring for them. La Hacienda Bakery in Houston has gone viral for its pumpkin-shaped concha rellena, stuffed with a pumpkin spice filling. “I never in a million years would’ve thought that it would go viral, and that people would drive up to eight hours to get it,” owner Leslye Rangel told the Houston Chronicle. “It’s bringing communities and families together.” She says they’re selling about 1,000 per day.
Camacho hopes that the increased availability of quality, inventive conchas will also lead to increased visibility for the labor and skill it takes to create them. “I hope it means that people, and specifically our own people, can accept that sometimes you have to charge $5 for a concha,” she says. “I hope our own people respect the craft and the difference that we’re trying to make in this industry, and pay what the food realistically needs to be.”
The rise of these bakeries is also about community. Everyone I spoke to shouted out other bakers across the country; Camacho says Gusto serves some of her favorite conchas, and Anders says she and Martinez were inspired to open Atla’s after seeing other pan dulce pop-ups online. “The mutual support we provide one another in pushing creative boundaries is clearly reflected in our pastries,” says Sibrian. That mutual respect and support creates a domino effect. The more people who do this, the more good conchas are out there, which means that more customers, especially non-Mexican customers, have an opportunity to fall in love with pan dulce. As consumer interest continues to surge, first-generation and diaspora bakers see that there is space for them. “I want to contribute to it, to give people fresh ideas of what we can do,” says Enciso. “Just push our culture forward.”
