Pan de Burro de la Mixteca

Pan de burro is from the Mixteca. Not from Oaxaca City, not from the Valles Centrales. From Tonalá and Huajuapan and the small towns of the Mixteca Baja, where the bread got its name because the panaderos baked it in the early hours and loaded it onto burros to deliver to the villages that had no panadería of their own. The bread had to last the trip. That is why it is dense, why it is enriched with manteca, why the piloncillo runs all the way through. This is bread engineered for distance.

The leavener is pulque. Not yeast. Pulque, the fermented sap of the maguey, has raised the breads of the Mixteca for centuries, and it gives this loaf a slight sourness and a slow rise that commercial yeast cannot match. If you cannot find pulque outside Mexico, I will tell you to use yeast and I will also tell you what you are missing. A substitution is a compromise, not an upgrade.

The flavor is piloncillo, anise, and canela. Three notes, no more. The piloncillo is dark, mineral, almost smoky. The anise is the breath of the bread. The canela is true Mexican cinnamon, the bark that crumbles in your hand, not the hard cassia from the supermarket. Ajonjolí across the top, toasted in the oven heat. La manteca es el sabor.

My mother was from Jalisco and she did not bake this bread. But on a trip to Huajuapan in the early years of the 32-state project, I sat with a panadera named Doña Eufemia who pulled twenty loaves out of a wood-fired oven at five in the morning and handed me one wrapped in a servilleta. She said: "Esto se hace con paciencia y con manteca. Lo demás es decoración." This is made with patience and with lard. Everything else is decoration. I wrote it in the notebook and I have not changed the recipe since.