{"id":30901,"date":"2025-10-30T22:33:25","date_gmt":"2025-10-30T22:33:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/30901\/"},"modified":"2025-10-30T22:33:25","modified_gmt":"2025-10-30T22:33:25","slug":"these-upshot-bakers-are-putting-new-spins-on-classic-mexican-pastries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/30901\/","title":{"rendered":"These upshot bakers are putting new spins on classic Mexican pastries"},"content":{"rendered":"

At 6 a.m. on a spring morning in 2023, Stephany Gocobachi was wandering through her grandfather\u2019s hometown of Alamos in the Mexican state of Sonora, looking for a panaderia. Usually bustling with tourists who come to admire the colonial architecture, the town center was quiet, save for the clucking of free-roaming chickens.<\/p>\n

Gocobachi \u2014 a San Franciscan who cut her teeth as a pastry chef at Danny Meyer\u2019s Maialino in New York \u2014 wasn\u2019t interested in the chic, French-style bakery that had recently opened in Alamos. Instead, she followed vague directions up winding roads through residential neighborhoods to find the kind of bakery her grandparents might have frequented decades before. Eventually, she found a nondescript panaderia run by three older men who pulled pan dulce from a wood-fired oven. She took one bite of a concha and decided to stay the rest of the morning to take it all in.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At 33, Gocobachi, a Mexican American pastry chef, had never tasted anything quite like that pan dulce \u2014 so simple yet so light, with delicate, nuanced flavor. \u201cThis is the moment I decided to open my own bakery,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Though she\u2019d been baking at San Francisco pop-ups under the name Panaderia Matijila, Gocobachi kicked her pan dulce game into high gear after that fateful trip, bringing her baked goods to taquerias and coffee shops across the Bay.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"APanader\u00eda Matilija uses traditional Mexican baking techniques. | Source: Stephany Gocobachi<\/p>\n

She is one of a growing number of upstart pastry chefs responsible for the Bay Area\u2019s vibrant array of pan dulce, a broad category that covers a variety of Mexican baked goods, including pan de muerto, often eaten on Dia de los Muertos, which falls on Nov. 1 and 2. In the past five years, other Mexican Americans have launched bakeries, including Norte 54, Florecita Panaderia, Amidulce, and Pain Pan Bakery, all of which are looking to redefine what Mexican pastries can be.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Where to get conchas and pan de muerto this week<\/p>\n

Panader\u00eda Matilija\u00a0
Public Land Store, 201 Clement St.
Saturday, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Preorder online (opens in new tab)<\/a><\/p>\n

Norte 54\u00a0
Mission Mercado, 84 Bartlett St.
Thursday, 3 to 7 p.m.<\/p>\n

Florecita Panaderia
2050 Bryant St.
Thursday through Sunday, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.<\/p>\n

\u201cMexican pastries have gotten such a bad rap in this country,\u201d Gocobachi says. \u201cTo me, that\u2019s sad, because there\u2019s no respect for the tradition, which is vast. There aren\u2019t really places where you can go to learn something that isn\u2019t a very Eurocentric baking tradition in the U.S. It\u2019s a disappearing art, and it\u2019s a lot of interest to me to preserve that.\u201d<\/p>\n

But if the flavors and textures of Gocobachi pan dulce feel modern, she says that\u2019s only because the traditional way of baking them \u2014 with quality ingredients \u2014 has become so rare. \u201cWhat I\u2019m doing isn\u2019t modern at all,\u201d she says. \u201cWhat I\u2019m trying to do is go backward to the root of it, to how it\u2019s supposed to be.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Raquel Goldman, who started her pop-up Norte 54 after working as a pastry assistant at Nopa, bakes with a similar mindset. Whereas commercial pan dulces often use cheaper ingredients like refined sugars and vegetable shortening, she makes her dough from scratch using little more than eggs, whole grain flour, and butter to produce conchas with a texture not unlike that of French brioche. \u201cNothing about bread is modern,\u201d Goldman says with a laugh. \u201cWe\u2019re harkening back to traditions that come from way long ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

But even if her pastries are rooted in tradition, they feel uniquely Californian \u2014 and in that way, like something entirely new. \u201cI see younger millennials who were either born in Mexico and raised here in California who see these pan dulce and recognize its Mexican-ness, but also then recognize how San Franciscan it is,\u201d Goldman says.<\/p>\n

Norte 54 proprietor Raquel Goldman.\u200b<\/p>\n

This mindset yields pan dulce like Gocobachi\u2019s lemon verbena conchas or chewy blue-corn masa cookies with bright hibiscus icing. During the fall, Goldman serves pillowy bigotes, a mustache-shaped sweet bread filled with a light pumpkin cream, and garibaldis, a sort of upside-down cupcake made with soft almond pound cake topped with ginger plum jam.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Al Toral, who runs pop-up Pain Pan Bakery in Sacramento, infuses his artistic conchas with unconventional flavors, including candied orange, black sesame, and pumpkin cheesecake. Amiduce, a mother-daughter operation in San Francisco, incorporates freeze-dried strawberries into concha dough and fresh strawberries in the Talavera-inspired sugar topping to impart a deeper flavor.<\/p>\n

\"\"Pan del muerto.\"ABigote.\"AGhost gansito.<\/p>\n

For Ximena Williams of Florecita Panaderia in the Mission, concha flavors are shaped by her binational upbringing. Born in Mexico City and raised in Atlanta, Williams started her concha-focused bakery out of her home in 2023 and opened a brick-and-mortar the following year. \u201cI\u2019m incorporating flavors that remind me of home, which means they can be from here and from Mexico,\u201d she says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Over the seasons, her eggless pan dulce \u2014 she substitutes apple cider vinegar for eggs so her husband, who has an allergy, can enjoy them, too \u2014 come in flavors like peach pie, pumpkin spice, blue corn, churro, and strawberry hibiscus.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Pan del muerto and a mix of conchas, including blue corn, chai, pumpkin spice, churro, and chocolate from Florecita Panaderia. \u200b<\/p>\n

Williams did not experience the kind of mythic-level quest that inspired Gocobachi to reimagine pan dulce in her own way. But somewhere along the way of baking conchas, garibaldis, and cochinitos, all of these bakers have gone through a process of rediscovery to reconnect with their Mexican heritage.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI tell people I came out as Mexican through baking,\u201d says Goldman. \u201cFor the longest time, my upbringing, how I went through my education, was all very American. To be able to be more rooted in the Mexican side now is so special.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At 6 a.m. on a spring morning in 2023, Stephany Gocobachi was wandering through her grandfather\u2019s hometown of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30902,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[22660,22661,101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-30901","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-francisco","8":"tag-bakeries","9":"tag-mexican-food","10":"tag-san-francisco","11":"tag-san-francisco-headlines","12":"tag-san-francisco-news","13":"tag-sf","14":"tag-sf-headlines","15":"tag-sf-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30901\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}