Pan de Elote Oaxaqueño

This is a Oaxacan bread. Pan de elote travels across Mexico, every state has a version, but the Oaxacan one is the one I am teaching you. The signature is the masa harina folded into the batter and the crema oaxaqueña spooned over the top at the table. Without those two, you are making someone else's pan de elote.

The corn matters more than anything else. In Oaxaca, the panaderas use the white field corn that comes down from the Sierra Norte and the Valles Centrales, maíz criollo grown for tortillas and atole, not the sugary yellow hybrid bred for the supermarket. That field corn carries starch instead of sugar, and starch is what gives this bread its body. If you use sweet corn, you will get a wet, candy-flavored cake. Hunt down white corn or a starchier yellow variety, the kind that releases milky liquid when you press a kernel. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.

My mother was from Jalisco and she made a different pan de elote, drier, sweeter, baked in a loaf pan. The Oaxacan version came into my notebook later, from a panadera named Doña Reyna at Mercado Alarii in Zaachila who let me sit in her kitchen for two mornings while she pulled trays out of a wood-fired oven. She told me three things and I am passing them on. Use the corn that is in season. Use both butter and manteca, never one alone. Pull the bread before you think it is done. The center keeps cooking once the pan is out of the oven, and an extra five minutes is the difference between tender and stale.

This is merienda food. Late afternoon, a few squares set out on a barro rojo plate, a clay jícara of chocolate de agua frothed with a molinillo, the family gathered around. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this one belongs to the panaderas of the Valles Centrales.