Pan de muerto--bread of the dead--is heavenly, the way Alex Peña makes it.
Decorated with skulls and bones and sprinkled with sugar, it has the most divine texture of any bread I've tasted, like cake and bread combined.
Peña (above right) was making it for the YouTube show Trippy Food (www.YouTube.com/TrippyFood), an episode you can see November 1. At left is show host Valentino Herrera.
Pan de Muerto is the bread that goes on the ofrendas (altars) set up for the Mexican holiday Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). On November 1, children who have passed away are honored. November 2 is for adults. The bread and other treats they loved in life are set out on the altar so they can "taste" them again when they return home for a brief visit.
At this time of year, all panaderías and Latino markets offer pan de muerto. Above is a supermarket loaf. Peña's bread isn't in retail outlets, but you can see how it's made on Trippy Food and imagine the dreamy taste.
Once, Peña made Mexican breads for his family's bakery, La Morenita in Cypress Park, which is now closed. They were the best I ever tasted. Now he's director of product development for Bellarise, a company that supplies yeast and other ingredients for industrial baking. Bellarise is part of Pak Group, the fourth largest yeast company in the world.
But Mexican bread remains Peña's passion, and the other night the lab where he works was filled with the sweet scent of freshly baked pan de muerto. The bread dates from the 1940s, created by Basque bakers who settled in Mexico City, he said.
A unique flavoring employed by the Basques was orange flower water. The taste of this in the bread is so subtle you hardly know it's there. Here, Peña sniffs a slice.
The other ingredients in his pan de muerto are yeast, flour, butter, lard, eggs, water, cane sugar and salt. Some recipes use cinnamon instead of orange flower water, but Peña says this slows fermentation, and he doesn't use it.
After mixing the dough, he forms it into rounds and refrigerates them to ferment. The slow fermentation adds flavor and improves the texture, he said.
Large rounds of dough represent tumbas (tombs). To make bones, Peña rolls small balls of dough into knobby strips and drapes these over the top of the tumbas. Other balls of dough represent skulls
Here is a completed loaf ready to go into the proof box, where it will develop for 45 minutes to an hour. The bread then bakes for 25 minutes in the lab's revolving oven.
Peña paints the freshly baked golden brown breads with melted butter.
Then he coats them with sugar. The custom is to use pink sugar for children and white sugar for adults, he said.
The way the breads are decorated varies from region to region in Mexico. Peña sprinkles some of the loaves with sesame seeds instead of sugar.
After baking, he lets the bread cool just long enough to slice and enjoy.
Talk about melt in your mouth, I've never tasted bread like this. It's truly a gift from Paradise.
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