Like a sourdough starter passed down from generation to generation, taking on aspects of its environment as it moves through many hands, Mexico’s tradition of delicious pan de dulce (a sweet bread, not to be confused with sweetbreads!) has evolved from its early beginnings in Spanish and French culinary customs.

 
With characteristic inventiveness, Mexican bakers took elements from both occupiers and transformed them into breads of different forms now numbering well into the hundreds. With variations in name and shape sometimes occurring from town to town within the same region, pan de dulce has become a kind of edible folk art emblematic of an entire culture – even in one as diverse as San Antonio’s.

 Or maybe especially in San Antonio, a city where influences from all over Mexico come together and where pan dulce (the “de” is often omitted) can be found everywhere from modest panaderias to spit-and-polish supermarkets. Your colorful conchas (shells) may be wrapped in cellophane at a neighborhood market, for example, and they may also be called molletes (cheeks). At a tiny bakery such as La Chiquita, a similar sweetened yeast bread may be baked with a slightly different topping of flour, sugar, shortening and food coloring and baptized a nube (cloud).  

 Sweet treats revealed through color, shape, and name

 Color is important to pan dulce regardless of the composition of the dough. Cuernitos (little horns) can be fashioned from a yeast dough and simply sugar-coated as found in Mi Tierra’s opulent bakery goods case. Or the same shape may be made from a shortbread-like base, a portion of which is unabashedly tinted with food coloring: brilliant orange at La Chiquita and bright pink at El Sol, a baker specializing in whole-grain pastries for diabetics.

 But color and shape are only part of the picture. The names are often equally seductive:

• The huarche, a flat perforated cookie, really does suggest the sandal it's named after--though the shape can also be called a tostado or even a changla (slipper).
• Besos, such as those found at La Michoacana, consist of two half-spheres sealed together with a strawberry kiss.
• An elote actually looks like a corn cob, and you can find examples at Bedoy’s, a bakery also known for its fanciful “Day of the Dead” breads produced for the November celebration.
• La jaiba? At Los Cocos, it’s a flaky pastry in a vaguely crab-like shape streaked with strawberry.
• You can also learn more Spanish as you eat by munching on a marranito (also called a puerquito), the piglet-shaped ginger cookie that’s the Mexican equivalent of the gingerbread boy.

But as evocative as names may be, there’s one thing they rarely reveal to the bemused buyer: taste. The ultra-flaky and sugar-glazed campechana normally stands on its own, but at Los Cocos you can find one with a fantastic – and unexpected – guava filling. Sweetened cream cheese may be lying in wait inside other seemingly innocent-looking pastries.

You’re always safe with an empanada, however, as this folded, half-moon shape has some canonic fillings. Fancier versions are wrapped in a sugary pie-crust dough and filled with apple or pineapple, but the most basic model is a sweetened purée of sweet potato or pumpkin sealed in a lightly spiced and slightly bready envelope.

Just think of them as the perfect melding of the bread tradition brought by the Spaniards with crops cultivated by the ancients – a bridge between two worlds and perhaps the perfect introduction into el mundo del pan de dulce.

If you go:

La Michocana Bakery, 3809 Blanco Rd. 210-733-5313

Bedoy's Bakery, 602 NW 24th St., 210-434-9290

Los Cocos Bakery, 2316 S. Laredo St., 210-224-8384

La Chiquita Bakery, 1225 El Paso St., 210-224-5194