Bake ‘Baby Bread’ as a Celebration of Life and Death

In June 2020, when many Americans were coping with the COVID-19 pandemic by stress-baking sourdough, Bryan Ford challenged them to think differently about it. In his book New World Sourdough, the Bronx-born, New Orleans-raised baker with Afro-Honduran roots asked readers to go beyond the boules, baguettes, and other European iterations of naturally leavened bread.

His second cookbook, Pan y Dulce, which comes out today, is an exhaustive, focused dive into the history of baking throughout Latin America. That means untangling the colonial legacy of wheat and other grains, as well as exploring the ways in which bakers in Mexico and beyond made la comida afrancesada (“Frenchified food”) their own. It also means delving into baking customs that have existed throughout the region for thousands of years.

“It’s a vast amount of knowledge,” Ford says. Putting everything into a single tome, he acknowledges, would be an impossible task. Yet Ford excels in convincing readers to tackle a project that might be unfamiliar or beyond their own baking experience. Each recipe is part history lesson and part technical crash course. The results are rewarding: from the sensational tripleta, Puerto Rico’s gut-busting late-night sandwich, to alfajores with homemade dulce de leche.

Gastro Obscura spoke with Ford about an infant-shaped bread for All Souls’ Day, Cuba’s “midnight” sandwich, and the African conquistador who may have been the first to plant wheat in the Americas.

How did you first get into baking?

I started a catering business in college with some friends. We were just bootlegging this catering company out of our apartment. It was wild stuff. We would cook for fraternity and sorority parties. We would just make fires in people’s yards, [bring out the] cast iron, and start making jambalaya.

We also started a cooking club sophomore year, using the dorm room kitchen. People would knock on the door and be like, “Yo, it smells so good. What are you guys doing in here?” We’re like, “We’re just sautéing some garlic and some onion, making a little chicken and making some rice. You heard me? We’re just throwing down a little bit of lunch.” And most people in college ain’t throwing down lunch like that.

So we started doing it every Sunday. Anyone could pull up, and we’d show you the basics of how to cook. That turned into catering. Then with the catering, I started baking. Mardi Gras came around. I was like, “I’m going to throw some king cakes.” That was really dope.

I became an accountant. I graduated and had to go get the job. But then after six or so years, I quit, and I decided to try to get back into spreading my passion for cooking and baking. I just started writing about it. From there, it turned into a whole media career.

How did you do the research for Pan y Dulce? What does your research process look like?

The first thing I do when I’m researching is I’ll call up some friends in whatever country I’m writing about. I have a lot of friends from Ecuador. So I’ll say, “Yo, what’s one of your favorite breads from growing up?” That’s usually a really good way to start the process because a lot of time, it’s something that you can’t exactly just Google off the bat.

So a good friend of mine was like, “Hey, you should look into pan de Ambato.” And then I went there with him and I started to find those things in person. Talking to old heads out there, the grandpas, they’ll tell you the tale of this nostalgic bread from Ecuador.

Then you stumble upon some articles. You stumble upon some books, and maybe it’s just one or two sentences that mention that [French travelers mistakenly] thought that Ambato bread was made of pea flour, but it had this flavor that was as robust as a wheat baguette or whatever they were making back home in Europe.

What’s something you learned that surprised you?

I learned that Juan Garrido, a Black man, was the first person to plant wheat in the Americas. He accompanied Ponce de León on his landing in Florida. He was a conquistador. He was technically a colonizer, but he was an African. He found his way to Spain and changed his name to Juan Garrido. I’m still trying to track down what his name was before that. But yeah, he was the one that planted wheat for the first time in all of the American continent.

How did Indigenous, European, and African traditions wind up together in some of these recipes?

It’s something I’ve always been curious about, being mixed race, Black, Hispanic, and growing up in the South. These questions are questions that I’ve had for a long time. Growing up in Louisiana, [I was] going to school with people who didn’t really understand what I am. “Are you Black? Are you white? Are you Mexican?” So in my head, I was always wondering, “What am I? What really went down to create what we are?”

In school, they just teach you that [Christopher Colombus] came and saved the day or whatever. Even with slavery, it’s taught in a way that focuses on the United States. People get confused about what slavery really was and where it took place and how it took place. I think that’s where you can really unpack the fact that to be Black is not tied to any one culture or any one language. To be Black is the product of the entire trade that occurred.

This is just the beginning of the deep-dive into how these foodways blended together with what colonizers provided or offered. It’s easy to find the story of the emperors and the kings that conquered Mexico and the wars that occurred. It’s harder to find how West Africans influenced Venezuelan cuisine. We know in theory it happened, but it’s difficult to find documentation of that.

One bread from the book really stood out to me. Can you tell me about t’anta wawa, the Andean bread which resembles a child?

Peruvian baking culture is probably one of the biggest in all of Latin America. There are just lots of different regions making lots of different breads. T’anta wawa is a bread that allows people to honor the loss of their child and try to find comfort within that moment. You’ll also find it in Ecuador [and Bolivia], sometimes under a slightly different name.

I think you’ll see there’s some similarities [in different parts of Latin America] in celebrating the dead, in celebrating or paying respect or a tribute to those loved ones that have passed away. In Mexico, you’ll see the pan de muerto, which a lot of people are familiar with.

Pan de yema [from Oaxaca] is also used in a way where you can bring it to a memorial or you can bring it to a wedding. It just highlights that bread is more than just to consume. It’s something that is utilized to pay respect.

Are there any recipes in the book that resonate personally with you?

The one that speaks the loudest to me is semitas de yema. Pan de coco is up there, too, but [when I was a kid] we ate semitas like they were candy. My dad would buy them in Honduras and bring them back in a suitcase.

I’m really excited about sharing the baleadas recipe because that’s the national dish of Honduras. The combination of masterful beans with that hard, salty, Honduran cheese, and the crema. The tortilla has to be absolutely on-point, slightly elastic, with a little bit of coconut milk. You really can’t beat that for me, period, in the savory food world. That recipe is the backbone of my palate, which is just because I’m Honduran.

But maybe switching away from just digging into my roots, I would say the golfeados. When we’ve done our pop-ups here in New York, they’ve the best-selling item, the one that people come back and get seconds and thirds for.

It’s this Venezuelan salty, sweet, sticky bun with cheese. It uses melado de papelón, this syrup made from panela or piloncillo, that coats the buttery dough, and you add that salty cheese, and you roll it up. After you bake it, you add more of that syrup and more of that cheese. You really can’t get the flavor of a golfeado from anywhere else. The dough has the slightest touch of anise, which plays a big role in Latin American cooking and baking.

Some of the sandwiches in the book look absolutely amazing. Could you tell me about a couple of your favorites?

Sandwich culture is definitely big in Latin American baking. Obviously tortillas de maíz [of corn] are the centerpiece of Mexican cuisine. But after colonial times, bakeries were set up to meet the needs of the French and Spanish emperors. Then they started making wheat bread in Mexico very much in a Mexican way.

They’re making these birotes, in Guadalajara, which has a specific climate and altitude, and they use sourdough and sometimes they use a little bit of lime and a little bit of beer. Then you add carnitas to that bread. Oh, and you know what? Let’s drown it in salsa. Now it’s a drowned sandwich, a torta ahogada. So you end up with this really unique sandwich culture in a lot of places all over Latino America.

I lived in Miami, and obviously everyone knows about the regular Cuban sandwiches: rustic Cuban bread made with lard, then your pork and your ham. I sat at a ventanita once, and I saw someone eating a sandwich, but the bread looked like a soft, buttery bread. And I was like, “Yo, what’s that?” “Oh, that’s a medianoche.” It’s a Cuban sandwich but with sweeter, enriched bread. The medianoche is no joke. I couldn’t even eat a whole one of them right now. It’s like a week’s worth of food. It’s a beast.

This interview has been edited for length.

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