Panaderia (bakery) it is.
Every time I walk past a Mexican bakery, I can't help but step inside, grab a tray and a pair of tongs, and start piling breads and pastries onto the tray as if I were hypnotized. I can easily spend half an hour checking out the selections and deciding what to get. The low prices certainly don't help. Since I am often the only non-Latino in the store and unable to speak Spanish, I have more than once attracted interesting gazes from the cashier and other customers alike.
I knew almost nothing about Mexican baking before moving to the Bay area. My only exposure had been a type of sweet bun called "Mexican bun" commonly found in bakeries in Hong Kong. I had no idea how the Mexican bun was introduced to Hong Kong, but it does resemble the pan dulce (sweet bun) that I see in Mexican bakeries. Talk about cultural amalgamation!
I love pan dulces for similar reasons I like Asian buns - most are soft and not too sweet. But pan dulces are denser and more filling than their Asian counterparts because of their heavy use of eggs and margarine. After eating a couple of these goodies, I hardly have room for anything else for the rest of the day or even the next morning. They are diet busters for sure, I don't even want to think about the amount of carbs and fats (trans, hydrogenated, all the bad stuff) they contain.
(Forgive my limited Spanish)
Two pan dulces (the one with the sugar coating should be called concha, which literally means shell) and a flat cookie sprinkled with sesame seeds
Cuerno (croissant), Mexican cheesecake slice, another pan dulce sprinkled with sugar
My favorite panaderia - Panaderia Hernandez in South San Francisco
Panaderia Hernandez's overflowing pastry case
Both bakeries offer incredible selections of freshly baked pan dulces, cakes, and cookies. Their pan dulces are just right with their sweetness and richness, so you don't need to wash them down with water/tea/coffee. They are also not too dry - I learned from a book that this can easily be a problem due to the high proportion of yeast in the dough.
Most important, the vast majority of their pan dulces do not seem to contain lard. I still cannot spot it all the time, but as a vegetarian I try to avoid it, and I am really put off by its smell.
If I had to pick the better among the two, it would be Panaderia Hernandez. Their pastries have a more delicate taste, likely because they are made from better ingredients (you don't get the off-taste). Their sizes are HUGE, but strangely enough they are cheaper too, even though the bakery is inside an upscale-ish Mexican supermarket. Too bad it's at an out-of-the-way location, but I continue to plan trips just to visit it!
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