Day 39: Today's Pick — A Concha That Made Me Drive Across Town

I drove 22 minutes across Oakland to a small panadería called La Borinqueña Mex-Icatessen for a single concha. I will do this again next weekend.

What a concha is

A Mexican sweet bread, the size of a small softball, topped with a thin shell of sweet paste pressed in a shell-pattern (concha = "shell"). The bread underneath is enriched with butter and a little egg, soft and slightly springy. The shell on top is sweet, slightly crisp, and traditionally vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry-flavored.

Why this one

The crumb is the difference. Most American grocery store conchas have a dry, crumbly bread underneath that defeats the entire experience. La Borinqueña's bread is soft enough that the concha tears apart in clean strips. It stays soft for at least 24 hours. The shell on top is crisp on day one and slightly chewy on day two — both are correct.

The shell is also better than most. Some bakeries' concha shells taste waxy or overly sweet (too much shortening). La Borinqueña's shells have a real butter flavor and a clean sweetness that lets the bread underneath be the star.

How to eat one

Hot, fresh, with a glass of cold milk. Or with coffee. Or, controversially, dunked in coffee. (The concha purist will tell you not to dunk; the practical person will tell you to dunk anyway. I dunk.)

What flavor

Vanilla. Always vanilla. The chocolate is also good but vanilla is the original and the best. The pink "strawberry" version is fine but I find the artificial flavor distracts from the bread.

How to actually buy

La Borinqueña, 6th and Webster in East Oakland. They open at 7am. Conchas are $1.75 each. They sell out by about 11am most days; weekends earlier.

If you're not in Oakland: the broader recommendation is "find a real Mexican panadería near you and buy fresh conchas." Almost every American city has at least one. The chain bakeries (Bimbo) and grocery store conchas don't compare.

A note on bread culture

This is the post where I admit that American bread culture is, mostly, bad. The bread we get at supermarkets is, by any honest measure, mediocre. The breads we get from real ethnic bakeries — Mexican panaderías, Vietnamese bánh mì shops, Italian forni, Polish piekarnias — are meaningfully better, and meaningfully cheaper. The cumulative effect of buying bread from a real bakery once a week is large.

I have, over the past two years, become someone who maps every neighborhood I'm in by which bakery is nearby. This map has improved my life.

A small story

The owner of La Borinqueña, a woman named Doña Berta, recognizes me now. The first time I came in I bought one concha. The second time I bought two. The third time she set aside a vanilla one for me without asking. The fourth time we talked for ten minutes about her daughter's wedding. This is the actual product. The concha is just the carrier.

Tomorrow: a $14 desk humidifier that, not joking, fixed my chronic morning headaches.