Esteban Castillo - Chicano Bakes: Recipes for Mexican Pan Dulce, Tamales, and My Favorite Desserts

For many of us, 2020 was a roller coaster. I was just starting to wrap up my first cookbook, Chicano Eats: Recipes from My Mexican-American Kitchen, when COVID-19 hit. I celebrated my thirtieth birthday on March 7, and at the time I felt as if I was at the top of the roller coasters first steep climb. A week later, I was heading to Seattle for a video shoot when I realized that things were about to get pretty serious. After the plane landed, I turned my phone on to read a headline about more COVID-19-related cases being detected in Seattle. It was like the amusement parks ride attendant had suddenly pressed the go button a second too early y la sangre se me fue hasta los talones. I became very anxious and started worrying about what the rest of the year would look like. Long story short, the rest of 2020 would be filled with a lot of questions and stress, but most important, also a lot of learning and growing.

Chicano Eats was published in the summer of 2020, on June 30. Publishing a book geared toward someone like my younger self, who had moved away from home for the first time and missed their parents cooking but had no idea where to start, was a dream come true, but for me the weeks leading up to its release were filled with anxiety. I was thinking to myself, Were in the middle of a pandemic! Are people going to be able to buy it? How am I going to promote the book? I also wondered about what recipes folks would gravitate toward first! My questions were quickly answered the first day the book was outand I felt as if the roller coaster was back to a smooth ride.

One of the recipes that went viral overnight was my dulce de leche chocoflan. This recipe was featured in the New York Timess food section, as well as other outlets like Food52. Everyone on Instagram started tagging me as soon as they made it. Folks were always amazed to see how the cake batter would go in first and then the flan on top of it, and during the baking process the batter and flan would flip places due to their density. So when the cake was inverted, the flan was now on top, and the cake on the bottom. No matter how many times I explained this tasty magic trick, folks would still ask, Shouldnt the chocolate cake be on top?

I was relieved to see that the community I had built over the past few years with my blog, Chicano Eats, was so excited to have a book with recipes that felt and tasted like home, a cookbook they could finally relate to, one that reimagined Mexican cuisine from a Mexican-American point of view. People who look like me dont often get the opportunity to showcase the things that matter the most to our communitiesno matter how hard we work. I was also very surprised to see that although summer had just started, everyone was flocking to the desserts chapter, as well as the more time-intensive recipes like my mole coloradito, birria, and carnitas. It all made sense though, because my community loves a hot dish when temperatures begin to soar. (Im looking at you, caldo de pollo!) As COVID-19 spread and the world continued its lockdown, people kept baking. I was constantly asked if I had a recipe for this dessert, that cookie, or this pan dulce (pan dulce is the catchall term for Mexicos pastries and sweet breads). I quickly realized that if I ever wrote another book, it would need to expand on my dessert recipes.

Since a traditional in-person book tour was out of the question due to the pandemic, I decided to launch a series of online cooking classes in the fall of 2020 so I could connect with readers from the comfort of their own homes and walk them through some of the more difficult recipes in the book. In those classes we made birria, pozole, flan, churros, mole, salsas, and chocoflan.

Their enthusiasm made me realize that so many people in my community wanted to join in the baking frenzy caused by the pandemic, but the resources and books for the sweets and pastries that my community wanted to bake and enjoy just werent availableand whatever was out there just wasnt easy to make. It wasnt tried and true. This is where the idea for Chicano Bakes was born.

I grew up in Santa Ana (SanTana for my locals), Californiaa predominantly Hispanic community in Southern Californiaright behind a shopping center that included El Toro Meat Market, a Mexican grocery store that is very much embedded in the fiber of the community. As the saying goes, El que no conoce El Toro, no conoce Santa Ana (If you dont know El Toro, you dont know Santa Ana), and I didnt realize how much of a gift that place was when I was growing up until I moved away for college. My family had daily access to a butcher for fresh cuts of meat, hot carnitas, crispy chicharrones, and dairy products, as well as fruits and veggies like cebollitas, ciruelas, caa, and nances that we just couldnt find anywhere else. Two doors down from El Toro was a Mexican bakery, and we could always tell when the panadero was bringing out fresh bread, because the sweet scent of cinnamon sugar danced through the air, like a sweet siren song inviting us in for a warm roll.

My dad would typically spend his evenings making spurs in the garage (thats a story for another day), and when we started to smell the toasted cinnamon in the air, Id go grab him and wed walk over for pan dulce. A fresh slice of cortadillo (Mexican pink cake) was my favorite, and a warm concha de vainilla with an ice-cold Coke was his.

Panaderas in the US vary depending on the community. In one town, a panadera might be a small shelf located inside a gas station, while in another it might be a storefront that focuses on selling fresh bread, coffee, champurrado, sweets, and cakes. In other areas, a panadera might stretch what they sell to make antojitos (savory bites).

Chicano Bakes captures my favorite traditional staple recipes from la panadera, while also giving you the opportunity to let your hair down with the fun fusion Chicano Eats recipes that Im known for! Youre going to get conchas, empanadas, and tamales as well as cakes, cocktails, and aguas frescas.

Youre also going to notice that this book looks and feels different from my first cookbook. That is totally intentional. Chicano Eats captured my childhood and my roots, and Chicano Bakes is meant to encapsulate where I am in 2022. However, although my viewpoint as an artist and photographer has changed, my approach to keeping my recipes simple, as well as tried and true, remains the same. From the versatility of the recipes in the (drinks), I want this book to be useful to folks, especially to my community, who might feel intimidated by baking books that dont cater to us. And Ive made sure this book is well rounded so you can get great use out of it year-round, not just during the holidays or winter months.

Taking the traditional route has never been the way I go. Weve all seen the same handful of ways that you can style cakes, pies, and chocolate chip cookies, but I wanted to do something totally different. Music gets me through the workday. When I was teaching my online cooking classes and developing the recipes for this book, I had Kylie Minogues album