Pan de Yema Yucateco

This bread belongs to Yucatán. Mérida specifically, the panaderías of the Centro and the family ovens of the smaller towns out toward Izamal and Maní. It is not pan dulce in the central Mexican sense. It is closer in spirit to brioche, but the panaderos of the Peninsula would correct you on that, and they would be right. Brioche is butter and milk. Pan de yema yucateco is twelve egg yolks and manteca de cerdo, scented with agua de azahar and the zest of naranja agria. That changes everything.

The color is the first thing you notice. A deep saffron yellow that comes only from a generous load of yolks, the kind the señoras in the Lucas de Galván market sell by the dozen from yard hens. Pale yolks give pale pan de yema. The fat is the second thing. Manteca, not just butter. Manteca is what gives this bread the soft, almost custardy crumb that holds up to a long dunk in hot chocolate without falling apart. La manteca es el sabor, and in this case la manteca es también la textura.

In Yucatán, this is the bread of the merienda, the late afternoon meal between four and six, when the day's heat finally breaks and people sit on patios with a clay jarro of tan-chukwa', the Mayan hot chocolate made with toasted cacao and a touch of canela. You tear the bread, you dunk, you let the chocolate work into the crumb. It is one of the gentlest rituals in Mexican food, and one of the most specific to the Peninsula.

My mother did not make pan de yema. She was from Jalisco and the breads of her childhood were biscochos and corundas. I learned this one from a woman named doña Bertha in a Mérida panadería called La Tata, who let me stand by the brick oven for three mornings without saying much. On the third morning she handed me a small notebook with one page of instructions, written in pencil, and told me the rest I would have to learn with my hands. Recetas probadas y garantizadas, but only if you put in the hours.