Orejas Yucatecas

Orejas are from the panaderias of Yucatan. Not from Paris. The French built the puff pastry, yes, but the Yucatecos took it, rolled it in sugar instead of flour, and made it a daily bread that sits in glass cases in Merida next to the conchas, the polvorones, and the marquesitas. Walk into any panaderia in the centro of Merida or Valladolid in the late afternoon and you will smell caramelized sugar before you see the shelves.

This is a laminated pastry but it is not a French exercise. The technique is simple and the ingredients are three. What separates a good oreja from a bad one is the sugar. You roll the dough on sugar, you fold the dough with sugar, you press more sugar into the slices before they go into the oven. The sugar is what caramelizes into the glassy amber crust that breaks apart under your teeth. Skip the sugar at any step and you will pull a sad, pale pastry out of the oven. La manteca es el sabor in most of Mexican cooking, but here, the azucar is the sabor.

The Yucatecan touch is the canela, the soft Mexican cinnamon that the panaderos in Merida often work into the sugar. It is subtle, almost not there, and that is the point. It tells you the oreja came from a Yucatecan kitchen and not a European one. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and Yucatan claimed this pastry as its own a long time ago.

My mother used to buy orejas from a panaderia on Avenida Alvaro Obregon in Colonia Roma every Saturday morning. The baker was from Merida and he made them the Yucatecan way, with the canela and with the heavy sugar. We ate them with cafe de olla and she would say they fell apart cleaner than the ones from any of the fancy bakeries in Polanco. She was right. Saber cocinar es saber vivir, and saber comer is part of the same lesson.