Conchas, Cuernitos, Pan de Muerto: An Intro to Pan Dulce in L.A.
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Jimmy Venegas arrives every day around 6:30 a.m. at La Monarca Bakery and Café in Hollywood for coffee and pan dulce, a beloved collection of Latin American sweet baked goods. His daily morning treat gives him energy and helps him focus on the hours ahead. Moreover, it connects him with important memories. "I was 17 years old when I arrived and since then I haven't stopped working hard to make a living here. Sweet bread reminds me of my family and my past life in Juárez, Chihuahua, where I was born. It tastes like home."
After 30 years, Jimmy is considering retirement at the end of 2021. He buys and fixes cars to sell them refurbished. With time, he has managed to gather a good team of painters, parts fixers and mechanics. He coordinates and supervises the entire process and has become an expert on flipping vehicles. Like many migrants that came through well-worn paths, he followed in the footsteps of his brother Sergio, who had arrived in 1989, two years before him. They work together every day and it starts with a morning ritual of pan dulce. "I switch between three of my favorites," says Jimmy, "The vanilla concha, a pineapple and coconut pastry and the flaky heart, I enjoy them all."
While his gaze wanders through the street across the parking lot and the wind gently blows through his features, Jimmy ponders his next steps: a foot surgery that he has delayed for years, going back to disco dancing — one of his hobbies as a young boy — and playing the guitar more seriously. Between bites of pan dulce paired with that morning cup of coffee, he has made his life as an Angeleno who has left part of his soul in Mexico. For him and many more with their own unique story, L.A. bakeries of Latin American origin or inspiration are spaces where paths cross fleetingly and where culture is tasted, but also where entire communities are brought together and transformed along the way.
Get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of La Monarca as it begins the day for business. Click right and left on the photo gallery below.
Jimmy's eyes shine when he thinks about dedicating more time to the guitar. "Music is within me; it comes so natural to me. I want to commit to it and I'm starting to think about the way of doing that." Surely, if music classes and some other projects start taking up more and more space in his life, pan dulce and coffee will still be there at the start of each day as well.
The Long, Complex History of Breadways
People are increasingly finding inspiration in the cultural blending of Los Angeles. Among other culinary themes and historical symbols, pan dulce represents a fair amount of Latin American baking creativity and breadways that have found their way to the city.
Pan dulce's Hispanic roots stem from the Iberian Peninsula or "Islamic Spain," as it is sometimes called. The Muslim invasion in the 8th century A.D. that lasted for more than seven centuries consisted of a mix of Jewish, Muslim and Christian beliefs and social practices, and the baked goods that we see today in Latin America and cities like Los Angeles reflect that complex and often violent historical process of cultural blending. They also reflect the influence of French, German, Swiss and Austrian baking, as well as the techniques from America.
Although pan dulce can generally be traced back as far as sweeteners and bread have existed, sweet bread as a subcategory of baked products is more prominent in certain regions where raw or refined sugar — especially the one made from sugar cane — was popular as an increasingly important source of calories and energy. In Spanish, English, French, Swiss and some Middle Eastern cuisines, for example, a wide repertoire of sweet baked goods (pastries, breads, cakes and other kinds of desserts) can be found. Sugar cane would go on to become an important crop and a source of revenue for Europeans in their process of colonization of American lands. Later on, it became a global commodity. With the rise of sugar cane came the increasing popularity of sweet baked goods.
At least three major moments marked the historical development of this important category in a broad Latin American way of baking: the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese to South and Central America and the subsequent process of evangelization; the arrival of other Europeans such as French, British, Swiss, Austrian and German immigrants in the 19th century and the process of technification and standardization of the second Industrial Revolution, which took place in the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. From then on, industrial and artisanal processes of bread making have grown, diversifying the display of baked goods, but sometimes compromising the quality because of standardization and production costs. Globalization and migration attached to an accelerated flow of people and goods is the most recent phenomenon shaping the use and transformation of foodways, among them bread and bakingways.
An Everchanging Flavor of Home
Humans migrate and take their culinary knowledge and their kitchen along with them. The collection of products that make up that sweet universe called pan dulce has traveled significantly to Los Angeles from different parts of Latin America — mainly México, El Salvador, Guatemala and, to a lesser extent, Argentina, Colombia, Perú, Venezuela and other Central American countries.
Pan dulce travels with its owners. These baked goods present themselves as they were originally, but they also continue to evolve and transform, adapting themselves to the availability of new ingredients and ways of cooking. Immigrant communities continue to shape and change their repertoire of dishes in response to local culinary language and palates, including those of younger audiences made up of their children and grandchildren, who have either been born or raised in Los Angeles. Their mixed identities as Angelenos and foreigners by blood have made this generation both a new and a known audience for their parents and grandparents at the same time. Vanguard bakers also rely on pan dulce's long culinary traditions to re-imagine and innovate in the kitchen as well.
There are hundreds of examples of these adaptations and transformations evident in pastry shelves throughout Los Angeles. La Monarca Bakery and Café offers oatchata, using oat milk as a substitute for the traditional horchata, which is usually made with rice soaked in water and aromatized with cinnamon. Although more in the category of cakes, the classic Italian tiramisú has been decorated with the Mexican flag's coat of arms using the characteristic cocoa powder. At many of L.A.'s Latin American bakeries, a "thematic" concha (the iconic Mexican round, soft and sweet bread covered with a white or colored glazed sugar soft crust that resembles the figure of a seashell) is often refashioned into a pumpkin shape for Halloween and the fall season. At Delicias Bakery & Some, vegan tres leches cake is served in a cup or blended. Tres leches is a moist, spongy cake soaked in three different kinds of milk —evaporated, condensed and cream — of Spanish roots.
Sometimes, a variation on the name of a product, translated and adapted from Spanish provides fascinating clues of a baked good's journey. Slight changes too are made in ingredients or techniques: cuernitos for example are an interpretation of the French croissant, filled with cream, chocolate, dulce de leche (caramelized milk), guava paste or just plain. The crescent shape is described in the word "cuerno" in Spanish (horn) with the diminutive addendum. Niño envuelto literally means "wrapped child" (referring to a baby wrapped in a blanket), known in Europe and the U.S. as a Swiss roll or jelly roll. It is a rolled sponge cake filled with jelly or whipped cream that in Latin American bakeries is filled with either dulce de leche, cream or different fruit preserves. Orejas or orejas de elefante (ears or elephant's ears) are a version of the French pastry known as palmier, palm leaf or cœur de France. The Salvadorian version of semita de piña, a linzer-style tart, is filled with pineapple preserves in Panadería Cuscatleca. Mantequillas are slices of soft bread spread with butter and sprinkled with sugar. They probably resemble the traditional bread and butter breakfast of many European countries — butter comes from that region — but using a slightly sweet milky bread with sugar on top. Another example of this journey is pan de yema, which is a briochy bread that comes in different sizes and is based on an eggy batter ("yema" means egg yolk in Spanish. The technique is similar to the one used for brioche, a bread from French origin). Panaderías throughout Los Angeles like El Salvador in East Hollywood, Sonora Bakery in East L.A., La Panadería Michoacana in Historic South Central area and La Mascota Bakery in Boyle Heights offer their own versions of this more regional style of pan dulce.
Of course, one cannot leave out the staple array of pan dulce that can be found at almost any Latin American bakery in Los Angeles. These could include: conchas (described above), pan de muerto (an iconic spongy, spicy bread flavored with anise and finished with coarse white sugar made for Día de los Muertos), rosca de reyes (a sweet oval bread made for the Catholic celebration of "Día de los Reyes" that symbolizes a crown. It's decorated with candied fruit and nuts and has a plastic doll inside that represents Baby Jesus), chocolate mexicano (an Indigenous beverage made with cacao paste infused in water, aromatized with spices such as cinnamon and cloves, unsweetened or sweetened with sugar cane paste or refined sugar), café de olla (brewed or filtered black coffee aromatized with cinnamon and brown or raw sugar), empanadas (baked dumplings made with wheat flour and filling that is usually salty but that can also be made of sweet flavors such as guava paste, vanilla custard, caramelized apples or dulce de leche, among others), alfajores (shortbready cookies filled with dulce de leche and covered with powdered sugar, shredded coconut or chocolate glaze, traditionally found in Argentina and other Latin American countries like Perú) and of course, tamales, another iconic dish in most countries of the region, which use palm leaves, plantain leaves or corn husks to wrap fillings of meat or fish and veggies, mixed with starch — often corn masa, cassava, or rice — for a flavorful dough. Tamales are also popular in sweet versions that use sugar cane, white sugar, honey, raisins, dulce de leche, chocolate and spices like cinnamon and cloves.
More British, French and Spanish influences in pan dulce can be more found in some bakeries like Pacific French Bakery with offerings like semita alta (a cakey marbled biscuit covered with coarse sugar), pegadito (a sweet spongy small roll sprinkled with coarse sugar, called mojicón in other Latin American countries), Guatemalan torta de azúcar (a sweet rounded small roll decorated with sugar in pretty shapes), margarita fresa (a pastry that resembles a strawberry mini galette) or quesadilla dulce (a pound cake enriched with cheese and decorated with sesame seeds).
Old Ways That Become New Creations
Arturo Enciso is the baker behind Gusto Bread, an artisanal organic bakery that started out of the home he and his partner and co-owner Ana Belén Salatino share in Long Beach. Last August 2020, Arturo and Ana opened their brick-and-mortar shop on the 4th Street Corridor in Long Beach offering such re-imagined pastries as nixtamal queen (a caramelized sweet bread made with heirloom masa), a fried dough pastry called doña filled with yellow peach and Mexican vanilla bean, as well as amaranth and almond macarons with hibiscus buttercream. Arturo's use of ancient techniques and ingredients combined with contemporary creativity has since earned Gusto Bread a place in the Los Angeles Times' 101 Restaurants, dishes, people and ideas that define how we eat in 2020, Food and Wine's 100 Best Bakeries in America and Eater LA's 38 Essential Restaurants in Los Angeles.
"For me it was beautiful to have access to the breads that my family grew up eating in Mexico," said Arturo, "It's part of me and I wanted to embrace that when I became a baker. All over the world bread became a commodity and cheaper in quality, and we disconnected from real ingredients, more natural cereals and the old methods. I love that of being a baker, I have learned so much along the way having had access to the breads which I grew up with and the breads of the world. I am influenced by all these breads, and I try to approach that in our bakery. I think that is the L.A. experience.
Learn more about the different pan dulce and baked goods Gusto Bread offers. Click right and left on the slideshow below.
When I started to make our sourdough concha for example [Arturo uses a natural starter with wild yeast instead of the usual commercial yeast], I didn't think 'Oh I'm making a new concha,' I thought 'Maybe that's how conchas were a hundred years ago and people forgot.' I don't think I'm reinventing the wheel. I'm more going back to the old ways to use simple techniques and all the old-world ingredients to cook something more nutritional, more wholesome. It makes sense to me, and it means the world to me when someone brings their grandmother or a relative that grew up with Latin American breads. They don't know about sourdough, or whole wheat, but when they eat it, they do know that it tastes natural and reminds them of when they were kids; that familiar taste is there. When I'm in those situations I feel that we are creating a community that can be transported to a certain place and time and appreciate it. I work with farmers and purveyors in Mexico that educate us. I have realized how many other people care and are passionate about staple ingredients like beans, corn, and wheat, things that I sell in bulk at the shop so that people get connected with the land. I experiment with ancient types of corn and ways of making masa for tortillas or with new chocolates imported from Mexico. We are all working together to get all these into people's homes and their bodies. To fuse all these techniques inspires me every day. These ideas and flavors represent this philosophy, what Latin American bread is, what pan dulce is, and what it can become."
Do you have a pan dulce story? Let us know.
About This Story
This article is part of a collection of stories exploring the ways pan dulce has been a part of the Southern California sweetscape, connecting us to deeply-rooted traditions and the flavors of home. Find more stories in the pan dulce universe in this collection.
Story written by Juliana Duque Mahecha. Audio and Video by Paula Kiley. Illustrations by Henry Cram. Photography by Justin Cram, Henry Cram and Paula Kiley. Edited by Carren Jao, Carla Pineda and Victoria Gonzalez. Special thanks to Carla Pineda and Melissa Arellano for pan dulce delivery.
