La Panderia

Rafael Marcos arises every morning at 4:00. He’s been doing so for 40 years. Rafael Marcos is a baker — un panadero y un repostero — a baker of both bread and pastries. Rafael owns la panaderia — the bakery — in El Quelite.

Carlos Osuna says, “Why would you want to be anywhere else? You have whatever you need in El Quelite.” Then he begins listing the town’s assets, and he always starts with la Panaderia.

La panaderia is on the small hill, near the back of the cemetery and the rooster and goat ranch. It looks like any other small house along the rutted dirt street, but it’s distinguished by the large sign painted above the door: “Panaderia.”

When you enter la panaderia, you step into the sales area, which is also the mixing room and the cooling room. You’re surrounded by racks of pastries and bread. Large buns and small loaves of white bread are to your right. Next to them are racks of empanadas and some of the assorted varieties of pan dulce. Along the back wall are more racks of empanadas and pan dulce.

The center of the room is dominated by the large table that serves as both sales counter and staging area for unbaked pastries being arrayed on trays to go into the oven. Rafael’s oven is outside. It’s through the back door of the sales room and to the left.

The oven is a large adobe hemisphere. It sits on a large platform of adobe bricks, about three feet above the ground. The oven, itself, is about three feet high at its center and eight feet in diameter. When I first saw it, I thought it looked like one of those giant African ant hills that you see in National Geographic photos.

The oven is covered by a roof to protect it from the weather, but the oven area is open on the front. The oven is fired by butane from a large pressure tank. It’s similar to all other cooking arrangements in Mexico. I’ve never looked inside the oven to see how the burners are arranged, but I assure you that all the varieties of pan, empanadas, and pan dulce that come out of the oven are uniformly cooked to the perfect stage of “doneness.”

The best time to visit la panaderia is around noon. That’s when most of the day’s baking is done, and most of the items on the racks are still warm. Pick up a round aluminum tray and a pair of tongs. Then start selecting items from the racks: bread, buns, empanadas of course, and a couple pan dulce. For simplicity’s sake, everything is three pesos each. That’s 30 cents, US.

Rafael’s bread and buns are perfect examples of their kind. He sticks to small loaves of white bread. They’re about eight inches long, three inches around the middle and tapered at both ends: sort of short, stubby baguettes.

The white buns, on the other hand, are always oversize. Some days, they’re large enough, I think, to hold a full pound of hamburger to build a super whopper grande. What would you do with it when assembled, though? Cut it in quarters for the kids,
maybe.

Rafael’s pan dulce are as good as any from any panaderia in Mexico, Watsonville, or Pajaro. Light and fluffy, they will float off the racks and onto your tray if you’re not careful.

Every day, you have a choice of empanadas stuffed with pineapple, strawberry, or apple fillings. You would call empanadas turnovers in a US bakery. I doubt that you could find any as light, sweet, and tasty as Rafael’s, though.

Rafael’s specialty is an empanada stuffed with squash — yes, squash. Rafael grows some of the squash and gets more from neighbors and the local frutas y verduras lady. They are big, colored, variegated calabazas.

Rafael mashes the squash meat into a uniform pulp, into which he mixes honey and cinnamon. He cooks this empanada stuffing in a small oven before placing it into the empanada dough and baking the empanadas. When I first heard about these specialties, I thought, “squash turnovers? I don’t think so.” Then I tried one. Now, I’ll take a dozen, please.

I’m told that on special order, Rafael will make a batch of squash empanadas that also contain a slice of ham and a slice of cheese. I’ve yet to try these, but I’m going to try to split an order of a dozen with George.

Besides selling to El Quelite residents who walk into la panaderia, Rafael also sends a daily load of baked goods down the road to El Quemada, the smaller village on the road from the highway to El Quelite. He also supplies Dr. Osuna’s restaurant and several of the nearby restaurants on the highway. Now that two or three new restaurants have opened in El Quelite, Rafael may have to take on some helpers to increase the daily output. I assure you that everything baked on any day is sold out and gone before midafternoon.

Things you have to watch out for at la panaderia are the tourist buses. Since Dr. Osuna has been promoting El Quelite as a mecca of rural tourism, small busloads of tourists visit town on most days. They all get fed lunch at Dr. Osuna’s restaurant, Las Laureanos, of course; then some of the buses will chug a load of passengers up the hill to la panaderia. When the tourists hit, stand back. They’ll clean the place out. Rafael sometimes has to politely impose quotas to save enough baked goods for his regular customers.

Come to think of it, it’s almost noon. This is the time to get to la panaderia before las touristas arrive.

©2006, Ken Layne

Hurricane Lane

Hurricane Lane hit southern Sinaloa in the late morning of September 16. I hit southern Sinaloa on the afternoon of October 27. There’s no significant relationship between the two dates (nor between the names), but I got to see some of the hurricane aftermath before the countryside fully recovered.

My first-hand experience with Hurricane Lane was limited to TV and internet reports. California television reports about Mexican hurricanes are cursory at best. The internet does better if you can find sites such as the one for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) or several similar weather-related sites. Even better, in this case, was the site for the “MazInfo,” Mazatlan chat group.

This group comprises mostly expatriate gringos and Canadians, with a sprinkling of native Mazatlecos. Almost all are permanent or long-term-temporary residents. MazInfo members got onto the hurricane watch early and with definite good reason. Mazatlan has been a hurricane target in the past, but not for several years. Everyone hoped to preserve their good luck.

The conclusion after Lane passed was: “It could have been worse.” By the time Lane approached the Mexican mainland, it was a Category 2 or 3 storm: a serious hurricane. Fortunately, Lane’s eye came ashore north of the village of La Cruz. That’s 80 or 90 miles north of Mazatlan or a third of the way to Culiacan. Mazatlan got a serious tropical rainstorm and high winds from the hurricane’s perimeter.

Judging from the photos I saw on the internet, most of the streets in Mazatlan collected one to two feet of water. A lot of residents found out that windows and patio doors that they thought were watertight weren’t. Although not up to full hurricane force, the storm winds were strong enough to teach respect. Large signboards that would have made great sails were blown over; some trees were toppled or well pruned, and waves scrubbed the malecon along north beach and elsewhere on the shoreline.

Ironically, Lane hit Mazatlan on Mexico’s Independence Day (september 16) and forced cancellation of the city’s parade and celebration. Mazatlan’s airport also got closed for a day but suffered no serious damage. All in all, the storm was best viewed on TV and the internet. I wouldn’t care to live through one like it.

A few days after Lane passed, I phoned Conchita to ask how El Quelite had fared. The storm winds pretty much blew themselves out over the 15 miles of low hills between the coast and El Quelite. Like Mazatlan, the town suffered a drenching rainstorm, though.

Conchita assured me that the house was fine. No water had gotten inside, and nothing had been damaged. I verified it myself, three weeks later when I got to El Quelite. A couple leaks had appeared, however, along the edges of the patio roof. They weren’t serious, but Conchita moved one table and a kitchen rack to keep them from getting wet.

Around noon on the 27th, I took the toll road south from Culiacan. I knew the toll road was open and passable and I wasn’t certain about conditions on the free road. I also wanted to see what Hurricane Lane had wrought along the coastal plain.

The toll road between Culiacan and Mazatlan is about 200 miles of grade-A, four-lane highway. It’s mostly straight and flat and follows the coast. In some places, it’s within a half mile of the shore. Elsewhere, it’s several miles inland. Everywhere, the road is separated from the ocean only by flat farmland. There are no hills or mountains to block the path of a storm.

The landscape looked normal as I started south. About 30 or 40 miles down the road, though, I started to notice a few trees that had been pruned strangely. Lopped-off branches lay on the ground. The top branches of many trees had been scalped. It looked like someone had come through with a giant weed whacker and given the trees a bad trim.

As I continued south, the damage aftermath got more extensive. I could gauge the relative intensity of the hurricane eye and the perimeter of the eye. The damage went from broken branches four or five inches in diameter to shattered limbs of eight or ten inches.
Only the trunk remained of many trees.

Just north of La Cruz, large tree trunks were snapped in two. These were trunks 12 to 16 inches in diameter, but they lay broken like small twigs snapped across someone’s knee. Bull’s-eye! This was the spot where the eye of the eye had hit. Devastation!

Cleanup work was in process all along the highway. Fallen branches had been cut into small logs and stacked for removal or already hauled away. Trees that had been snapped but not completely broken, got whacked with chainsaws to clean them up. In a short time, the trunks will sprout new growth. Reforestation happens quickly on its own.

Most of the large pieces of downed timber will be, or already have been, salvaged. Are the broken limbs going to firewood? Maybe some, but not a lot. Some of the wood will go into wood-burning cook-stoves, but there aren’t many — if any — fireplaces in Mexico. Most of the salvaged timber will become fence posts and construction lumber for farm buildings. Mexican farmers don’t waste anything.

As I continued south, visible destruction decreased. Near San Dimas, 40 or 50 miles north of Mazatlan, the landscape was back to normal. Lane’s eye had been about 9 to 10 miles in diameter.

Lane’s damage wasn’t limited to trees and bushes and fields. The abutments on several small bridges over rivers had collapsed and dropped the bridge spans into the water. Mexican highway crews worked diligently after the storm, however. Temporary repairs were in place in most damaged areas to keep the road passable. In one spot, the southbound lanes were diverted to one lane on the northbound side of the road to bypass a bridge span that was lying with one end in the river and the other still at road level, aligned with the roadway.

Besides the highway, other man-made structures suffered Lane’s power. A large storage facility for harvested corn had consisted of four very large, tank-like structures. They were built of light-gauge sheet metal with a light framework: Just enough to do the job of short-term storage. When I saw them, they looked like Lane had stomped them as aluminum beer cans, ready for recycling.

I saw some farm buildings that had been flattened by the storm but only one obvious residence. I don’t know what other residential damage may have been scattered around the countryside, out of sight of the road. I hope not much.

I hope that livestock were inside structures that survived the storm. If any were caught in open fields, the legendary flying pig may have become a reality. I have to hand it to Mexican farmers. As soon as the fields dried out, they were out on their tractors, replowing the ground and getting ready for fall planting.

All of this hurricane action took place at the latitude that marks the northern edge of the Tropic of Cancer. These are the tropics, and in the tropics, stuff grows. Trees that had been stripped bare of leaves and branches were already putting out hundreds of new shoots. New twigs, a foot to a foot and a half long just a few weeks after the storm, made the trees look like giant shaving brushes with short, stubby bristles.

All in all, it’s a good thing that Hurricane Lane made landfall away from a city of half a million. Lane was a Category 2 or 3 storm: medium-sized by relative Hurricane standards but powerful nonetheless. Seeing the damage to the countryside taught me new respect and empathy for the citizens of southern Louisiana and
Mississippi. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were Category 4 or 5.

Just a few days before I left California for El Quelite, a new hurricane was stirring up in the Pacific. Hurricane Paul was trying to grow into a big-boy storm but not doing too well at it. By the time Paul got close to Cabo Six-Pack on the tip of the Baja Peninsula, it was downgraded to a large tropical depression. It was in this depressed state that Paul was supposed to throw some rain at the mainland, south of Culiacan. If it rained any before I got there, I didn’t see any sign of it. And that’s the way I like it: quiet and warm. Now if the damned humidity would just drop!

©2006, Ken Layne