Panaderia Colon

Señor Pedro Gonzalez














A "concha"











Pan de muerto

Meet Señor Pedro Gonzalez. He is eighty-years-old and he’s been baking bread for seventy years! He is the proprietor of Panaderia Colon where he runs the shop and bakes all the pan dulce himself. The locals call him el maestro de pan. He gets up early each morning to mix the various types of dough by hand on a massive wooden table. By 1:00 pm or so, evident from the mouth-watering smell of baking bread wafting down the street, the first batch is ready for sale. If you arrive at his shop (the ovens and shop are all in one room) before things are ready, then he tells you un ratito (just a few moments more).
He makes 500 pieces of pan dulce per day. Most of these are single-serving sweet buns, sugary danish, muffins, cookies, and fruit-filled empanadas. Señor Gonzalez says that the most popular type of pan he sells is the concha. It’s a round bun made with the regular sweet dough and topped with a crumbly, sugary mixture which is either vanilla or chocolate flavoured. This type of bun is commonly eaten at breakfast and dipped in coffee or chocolate (hot chocolate). However when we buy them they usually don’t last until next morning’s breakfast.
Señor Gonzalez usually finishes baking his last batch of bread around 4:00 pm and it’s shortly after this that he closes shop because his breads sell out as fast as they come out of the oven. Lucky for us, Panaderia Colon is just across the street, so it’s all too easy for us to secure our daily quota of goodies.
These days Señor Gonzalez is also baking pan de muerto (bread of the dead) which is eaten a few weeks before and on the Day of the Dead. Pan de muerto is a sweet egg bread often flavored with cinnamon or sometimes anise. The top is decorated with dough in the shape of bones and it’s sprinkled with icing sugar. Most grocery stores these days are selling it in anticipation of one of Mexico’s most important holidays. I’ll be writing more on Day of the Dead in next week’s post.