Pan de Huevo de Todos Santos

This is from Baja California Sur. From Todos Santos specifically, the small Pacific town a couple of hours north of Cabo, where the panaderias still fire brick ovens with mesquite and the morning line at Panaderia El Poblano starts before the sun is up.

Pan de huevo is the bread of the south of the peninsula. Wheat country, not corn country. The Jesuit missionaries brought wheat to Baja in the 18th century and it stayed. The ranches between La Paz and Todos Santos built their kitchens around it: flour tortillas, empanadas, and these slightly sweet egg rolls that go with cafe de olla in the morning and with a glass of milk before bed. The lard is not negotiable. La manteca es el sabor. Butter makes a French roll. Shortening makes nothing. Manteca de cerdo, rendered properly, gives you the tender crumb and the faint pork sweetness that distinguishes the bread of the Baja ranches from anything else.

The shape is the torcido, a short tapered cylinder, golden on top from a generous egg wash, sometimes sprinkled with sugar. The orange zest and a drop of azahar are old-school touches from the panaderos who came down from Sinaloa and Sonora and brought their citrus with them. I learned this version from a woman named Dona Chayo who has been baking at her family panaderia outside El Pescadero for forty-one years. She does not measure. She told me: "Manteca tibia, harina buena, huevos del rancho, paciencia." That is the whole recipe. Recetas probadas y garantizadas.