Pan de Muerto Oaxaqueño con Cabecita

This is from Oaxaca. Not Mexico City. The pan de muerto you see in supermarkets, round, sugar-dusted, with crossed bone shapes on top, is the Mexico City version. It is a different bread. The Oaxacan pan de muerto is pan de yema, an egg-yolk bread that the panaderías of the Valles Centrales bake all year, dressed up in late October with a painted cabecita, a small dough head, that represents the soul who is coming home for Día de Muertos. Two breads, two states, two traditions. Cada estado, su propia cocina.

The dough takes pulque. Not yeast, pulque. The fermented agave is the leavener and it has been the leavener of Oaxacan pan de yema since long before commercial yeast existed in Mexico. Pulque gives the bread its tang, its slow rise, its character. If your pulque vendor only carries the canned stuff, find a different vendor. The wild yeasts in fresh pulque from the pulquería are what you are after. The eight egg yolks and the manteca de cerdo carry the flavor the pulque builds. La manteca es el sabor.

The cabecita is the part most people outside Oaxaca have never seen. The panaderas at Mercado Alarii in Zaachila and the Sánchez family in Miahuatlán shape the little heads two days before they bake, dry them out on a cloth in the open air, then paint them red with grana de cochinilla and dark with añil. The face goes onto the bread before it bakes. When the bread comes out of the oven, the painted face has set hard, and the bread is placed on the ofrenda with a jícara of chocolate de agua. My mother was from Jalisco and she did not bake pan de muerto, but I learned this one in a wood-fired bakery in Tlacolula from a woman named Doña Esperanza who had been making them for fifty-three years. She told me: 'El cabecita es el alma. Trátalo como tal.' The little head is the soul. Treat it as such. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.