pan dulce

A concha taste test update: Am I missing something here?

September 11, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

Concha rolls are never far from my mind, seeing as I’m on a permanent quest to find the best concha in Mexico City. The subject came up again on Saturday night, when my friend Jesica urged me to give Maque another chance. We were sipping tequila at a local lounge.

“They’re really good!” Jesica said, as the music pumped at the bar. “I promise!”

I’d banished the Condesa bakery from my list a few months ago, after tasting one concha and finding it dry and bland. But it is possible I got a bum batch. So I went back to Maque on Tuesday morning.

As soon as I sat down, a waiter appeared and asked if I’d like a piece of bread.

“The concha,” I said, firmly.

He chose a particularly large chocolate concha from his basket, and set it on my plate. It looked beautiful. (That’s it above.)

I took my knife and fork, and gently sliced off a piece. Took a bite, and….

The chocolate coating was powdery, almost sandy. Like they’d wiped the concha around the floor as a Swiffer. I poked away at the coating with my fork and tried a piece of the bread. It was… okay. Soft enough, but almost… papery tasting. And an off-buttery flavor lurked in the background.

I declared it dead after four bites.

The point is: I really trust Jesica’s opinion, and Maque has a great reputation here in Mexico City. Am I missing something? Are the conchas at Bondy actually Americanized, and I just don’t know it? I had them again about a week ago, and they were the stuff of dreams. A toasted-sugar, almost creamy chocolate coating lay on the bread, which was so soft, you could probably mash it with the underside of your fork and it would stick. It was like the center of a cinnamon roll. (But without the cinnamon.) Oh man, oh man, oh MAN.

But maybe that isn’t Mexican at all.

Well. The next steps in my Best Concha of Mexico City test are visits to Sak’s, La Casita del Pan in Coyoacan, Pastelería Suiza in Condesa (just because I want an excuse to go there), and on the advice of reader Alice, La Casa del Pastor. And need to make my own conchas, just so I can figure out how difficult this really is.

A trip to Maque, and my search for the perfect concha roll

July 23, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

As you’ve probably already guessed, at any given moment of the day, I’m thinking about food in some form or another. I get obsessed with ingredients quickly — panela cheese! mangoes! mamey! — and then the obsession peters out, replaced by the next thing.

Lately, hovering about it all, is my obsession with the concha roll.

Bondy started this whole business. A few weeks after we moved here, we went there for breakfast, and the waiters presented us with the lushest, softest concha I’d ever seen. This was not the bland concha of my American childhood. I took a bite and felt myself lifting up out of my seat, my spirit transported to the clouds, where piles of rainbow-colored conchas frolicked in rays of God-light.

Since then I’ve tried to find a concha that’s equal to or better than Bondy. I hadn’t had much luck so far, but then I heard about Maque, a Condesa café on Parque Mexico. My guidebooks raved about Maque’s conchas. So we went last Sunday for breakfast. A friend warned us to get there before noon, because the tables fill up quickly.

Just before noon, there was already a 30 minute wait, and the smell of baking bread enveloped the entrance and teased everyone. Waitresses in long, light-blue dresses and white scalloped aprons bustled around with trays of pan dulce, offering bisquets, cuernitos, cinnamon rolls and tiny baby conchas to the customers sitting outside. I tried to ignore the rumbling in my stomach.

Finally, we got a table, and our waitress took our coffee order and rushed away. I stared longingly at a tray of bread nearby.

A few minutes later, she appeared again. This time clutching the tray and a pair of tongs.

“A piece of sweet bread?” she asked.

I pointed at a caramel-colored baby concha.

“And for you sir?”

Crayton got a cuernito.

She placed the concha on my little white plate, and I prepared my fork and knife. Oh man. This was it! This was it. I took a bite of the concha and…

Disappointment. It was on the dry side. And bland. The crunchy, quilted crust was nice, but it was definitely not as good as a concha from Bondy. I decided not to even take a picture of it.

When she came around the next time, I ordered a bisquet with a dollop of queso.

It was dense and buttery, and much better.

I’m not going to rule out Maque yet. Maybe our rolls were old. Maybe new ones had just came out of the oven, but a mean waitress grabbed them and served them to another table. Maybe the larger conchas taste much better, and everyone knows that but me.

I’m going to give them one more chance. And the next time I’m there, I might have to sneak in a taste of their cinnamon rolls, too.

Moody, magical Patzcuaro Michoacan

June 29, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

This sounds kinda dorky, but one of my secret pleasures in life is contemplating the clouds. (I’m actually a wee bit of a closet hippie.) When I lived in Boston, I couldn’t get over how fast the clouds moved. They were like trains, pushed this way and that by the wind.

In Patzcuaro during the rainy season — which is now — the clouds are so amazingly beautiful, they’re like people, almost. They’re grayish and menacing, and they hover over the mountains as if to say, “We all know who’s really in charge here.”

In my hierarchy of Patzcuaro beauty, the clouds come first; then the mountains, then the lakes, and then maybe the cornstalks that grow all over the side of the road. And then maybe the amazing loaves of crusty, caramel-brown bread that sit in the bakeries.

(Can you tell she’s in love?)

We jetted off to Patzcuaro just for a night this weekend. It was my second visit there, and thankfully I didn’t have a stomach bacteria this time. Joy and her husband invited us — they’d visited Patzcuaro a few weeks ago, and were going back to buy a copper vase they’d seen in Santa Clara del Cobre, which sells all sorts of great copper handicrafts.

In Patzcuaro, we stayed at the Hotel Ixhi, which was nice even if the staff was a little disorganized. The views there couldn’t be beat:

We wandered around Patzcuaro’s historic Centro for a few hours, and had wine on Ixhi’s porch as the sun went down. On Sunday morning we drove to Santa Clara del Cobre, and I fought the urge to buy a copper sink. Although I really really want one in my house someday.

Sweetbread for sale in Patzcuaro's Plaza Grande

A street in Santa Clara del Cobre

A stall from Patzcuaro's Sunday market

Crayton and I also bought a piece of art from La Mano Grafica, a cool gallery next to the Basilica. It’s a print from Artemio Rodriguez, a Michoacan native who spent some time in L.A. (His exhibition space is in Patzcuaro.) Didn’t realize this until I got home, but he’s the same artist who did the woodcuts for Dagoberto Gilb’s book Woodcuts of Women, which is one of my favorite books ever.

We drove through a horrible rainstorm on the way back, but overall, it was a perfect weekend trip.

Still thinking about those clouds…

Why it’s a bad idea to shop at the tianguis while hungry…

May 18, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

…Because, after sampling everything the vendors hand you, including guanabana pulp and mamey and a big chunk of avocado, you STILL stop on the way out at the stand selling the world’s tiniest breakfast pastries, and you promptly purchase a whole bag of them, because they’re so little and cute.

You also ask the lady, “What’s that?” and point at what looks like a large chunk of bread. She says, “A borrachito — bread soaked in honey.” So you buy that too and gobble it on the way home, lack of antibacterial hand gel be damned.

And then, the morning after preparing a huge batch of chicken tinga, and eating four tacos stuffed with tinga and avocado and riquísimo panela cheese:

You eat said pastries with coffee, relishing in their butteriness, but really thinking, why did I purchase these again? I really bought a whole bag?

I’m spending like two hours at the gym today.

An ode to conchas at Bondy in Mexico City

January 31, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

Oh soft concha pillow
Quilted with cocoa and sugar
One crackling bite
She swoons
Dreams of lolling around on its gauzy mounds
Is there such a word as “Yummerifico?”
I just invented it

Seriously: Bondy inspires poetry. We went there for breakfast this morning and the waiter immediately set down one of these huge trays of bread. After using my knife to cut a small piece of everything, including a honeyed donut, a cinnamon roll, a cheese-stuffed pastry and said poetic conchas (they’re the dark brown rolls above), I ordered my real breakfast: Scrambled eggs with ham and rajas, or strips of grilled poblano pepper.

Oh god. The tangy, charred peppers, the smoky ham… where had this combination been all my life? It’s hangover food Numero Uno. (We stayed out a little late last night.) I am so making this at home when we get a kitchen. Crayton had huevos divorciados — poached eggs on soft corn tortillas, one doused in green sauce, the other in red sauce.

I did actually say “yummerifico” when we finished eating. I know you’re not surprised.

If there’s such a thing as bakery porn, it resides at El Globo

January 27, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

Lola, the woman who does our housekeeping, told me last week that if I ever wanted a “trocito de pan,” they’re delicious at El Globo. It’s a French bakery chain that originally opened in el D.F. in 1884. There’s one in my neighborhood, a few blocks away.

Since we really don’t eat much bread — “Hmmm,” you say, “what about the bisquets?” — okay, since we, I mean I, TRY not to eat much bread, I thought I’d pop in and check it out from a cultural perspective. Also, I kind of adore bakeries, and the smell of baking bread turns me into one of those cartoon characters levitating with her nose in the air.

I’ve been inside Mexican panaderias before, but El Globo took things to a whole new level.
…

A bisquet, a basket

January 27, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

My current favorite morning/afternoon/whenever snack in Mexico City: Hot bisquets with butter and jam. They’re pronounced like “bis-KET” and they don’t really taste like biscuits at all. They’re dense and sweet, slightly crisp on the outside, and made with either white or wheat flour. They pretty much blow bland English muffins out of the water.

Here are the ones I got at The Break, a coffee shop near my house. (If anyone’s wondering, “wireless Internet” is the same in English and Spanish.)

bisquets

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