Pan de Yema Oaxaqueño

This is from Oaxaca. Specifically from the panaderías of Oaxaca City and the Valles Centrales, where pan de yema sits in baskets at Mercado Sánchez Pascuas and Mercado Alarii in Zaachila by five in the morning, still warm from the wood-fired ovens.

The first thing to understand is that pan de yema is not pan de muerto. People outside Oaxaca confuse the two constantly, and it makes the panaderas in Tlacolula tired. Pan de muerto in Oaxaca is hojaldra, painted with a cabecita figure of vegetable-dyed dough, baked once a year for the Día de Muertos altar. Pan de yema is everyday bread. You eat it on a Tuesday morning, on a Sunday afternoon, when company arrives, when a niño needs a merienda. It is the bread of ordinary life. Knowing the difference is the difference between someone who knows Oaxaca and someone who has read about it.

The yolks are what define this loaf. Twelve of them. Not eight. Not ten. Twelve, the way the Sánchez family in Miahuatlán has done it for three generations. The lard is what gives the crumb its soft, almost flaky pull. The anise and the orange zest are what make the kitchen smell like an Oaxacan panadería at dawn. None of these ingredients are negotiable. Replace the manteca with butter and you have made a French brioche. Skip the anise and you have made a generic enriched roll.

My mother's notebook had a page for pan de yema in pencil, copied from a woman she met at a market in Tlacolula on a trip we took when I was twelve. The note in the margin said: 'rompelo, no lo cortes' (tear it, don't cut it). She was right. You tear pan de yema. The crumb is meant to come apart in your hands and meet the chocolate de agua halfway. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.