Pan de Datil de Loreto

This bread comes from Baja California Sur, from the oases of Loreto, San Ignacio, and Mulege, where the Jesuit missionaries planted date palms in the 1700s and the palms outlived the missions by three hundred years. Those palms still feed the towns. The dates that go into this loaf are the same variety that has been falling off those trees since before Mexico was a country.

The Baja Sur peninsula is not corn country. It is wheat country, ranch country, and date country. The oases hold the dates and the pecans. The ranches give the lard. The piloncillo travels in from the mainland. The honey comes from bees working the orange blossoms in the mission gardens. Put those four things together with flour and you have pan de datil. There is no butter in this bread, and there should not be. La manteca es el sabor, even in a sweet loaf. The lard carries the date flavor in a way butter cannot.

I traveled to San Ignacio in the second year of my 32-state project and stayed with a family whose grandmother had baked this bread in a horno de barro every Sunday for fifty years. She showed me her method on a piece of brown paper, written in the same kind of penciled shorthand my mother used. Pour boiling water on the dates with baking soda. That single trick is what separates a proper pan de datil from a dry, brick-like loaf. The dates collapse, the soda darkens the crumb, and the bread comes out dense and moist the way the women of Baja Sur have always made it.

This is a make-ahead bread. It is better on day two. It travels well, keeps for a week wrapped tightly, and was, for generations, the bread that ranchers carried into the sierra when they rode out for days at a time. Cada estado, su propia cocina. This is Baja Sur on a plate.