The smell of sweet, toasted cornmeal fills the air as Melody Quintana pulls a batch of corn muffins from the oven. The muffins need to cool first, but the tender crumbs still hold on to some of their residual heat when placed alongside other sweetbreads and pastries.
Her shop, named after her son, Emilio’s Mexican Bakery, has been a neighbourhood favourite since it opened last spring at 634A Vaughan Rd., near the stretches of Eglinton West and St. Clair West, now destinations for Latin American cuisine.
The bakery’s shelves are stocked with multi-coloured conchas and flaky orejas, the Mexican equivalent of elephant ears, or palmiers, sometimes shaped like butterflies or hearts. But my eyes are drawn to the pan de fiesta (also called pan de fiera), a large, pull-apart, eggy sweetbread adorned with sesame seeds and chopped pecans, meant to be shared during celebrations. It was what the owner of a Mexican grocery store told me to look out for when she suggested I visit Emilio’s. She had never thought she would be able to buy it in Toronto until now.
Toronto’s Mexican bakery boom
For decades, Toronto has been flush with taquerias, but dedicated Mexican bakeries were harder to find. While Pancho’s Bakery, which has been around since 2009, focuses mainly on churros, newer shops like Emilio’s, Tres Panaderos, nearby on Eglinton West, and La Única’s two North York locations are bringing a wider variety of breads and pastries to the city. The smell of success is accented with notes of cinnamon-sugar and anise.
“When I came here six years ago, I saw Portuguese, Italian, Middle Eastern bakeries, but no Mexican bakeries in my neighbourhood,” said Quintana. “Maybe some places had conchas, but no dedicated Mexican bakeries.”
Quintana previously worked at a Mexican restaurant in the west end where she encountered Luis Quintero, a veteran pastry chef with 20 years of baking experience in Aguascalientes in Central Mexico. He was looking for a job at the restaurant and was passed over, but Quintana saw the potential. She rented out a space in the restaurant’s kitchen to start a bread business with Quintero as the head baker. She drove to various community events and neighbourhoods like the one around Plaza Latina that catered to the local Mexican-Canadian population, and sold directly to customers who were craving the breads they ate back in Mexico.
“We tried to make everything we do like we did in Mexico, to bring a bit of Mexico to Toronto,” she said, adding that the self-serve trays is part of the experience of going to a Mexican bakery. “When we opened, it was almost all Mexican and Latin regulars, but now I feel that people from all different countries come here now.
The top shelf at Emilio’s is dominated by conchas, the most widely known Mexican sweetbread. Named after its resemblance to a seashell, a concha is a chewy bun topped with a crumbly, crispy, sugar layer that’s often infused with vanilla, chocolate or strawberry flavours.
There are also donas, fluffy Mexican yeasted doughnuts covered in cinnamon-sugar (with a chocolate-dipped version), along with rebanadas and sugar-dusted sweetbreads shaped like empanadas, ears of corn, and the sun, filled with strawberry, pineapple, and apple jams. Polvorón cookies, cubilete de queso, and crusty loaves for tortas round out the selection, while the fridge holds tres leches, flan and chocoflan.
Bread is an important part of many Mexican households, said Gabriela Flores, owner of Tienda Movil, a Mexican grocer in East York and Etobicoke that first opened in April 2021. She was the one who initially sent me to Emilio’s to pick up a loaf of pan de fiesta. In the 16 years she has lived in Toronto, she has also noticed a recent mini boom of panaderías offering a greater assortment of the baked goods she ate as a kid.
“It’s really common to have bread in the morning and at night. It’s definitely a product I feel very attached to,” she said. “It’s how we grew up back home. You have tamales with bread for breakfast. Our mothers and grandmothers made bread at home if they couldn’t buy it. It’s one of those things that’s so good you can share with people.”
Emilio’s isn’t the only newcomer. Across the city, other bakers are filling the gap in Mexican breads, like the Concha Factory, which, as the name suggests, specializes in the namesake Mexican sweetbread.
Paola Martín started the Concha Factory three years ago because she missed the taste of freshly baked conchas back when she worked full-time as a fashion designer in Mexico. She couldn’t find a bakery that regularly made them, so she taught herself by following YouTube tutorials uploaded by bakeries in Mexico.
“It’s a lot different baking here than in Mexico,” she said, regarding the need to rework recipes to fit a Canadian climate. “Because it’s cold here for most of the year, when the recipe says to wait 15 minutes for the dough to rise, I have to wait three hours.”
Her traditional conchas — plain, vanilla-flavoured with crust that looks like scallop shell — are what sells at Tienda Movil, but in the social media age, Martín also takes custom orders via Whatsapp resembling Minecraft and Peanuts characters; dinosaurs; soccer balls, flowers for Valentine’s Day, and painted with Mexican pottery patterns. She even made a Labubu concha. Martín added the influx of Mexican breads aren’t just showing up on the streets, a lot of bakers that can’t afford to open a brick and mortar store also sell their breads online since the province allowed for more home-based food businesses in 2021.
It’s another step in Toronto’s increasingly diverse food scene, but for people like Flores, seeing more panaderías open has a deeper meaning.
“In the last two years, there’s a lot of new bakeries that makes me feel happy about it. It’s not just conchas, but other types of sweet and salty breads, flan, tres leches, It’s good to see it,” said Flores. “Breads like the Rosca del Reyes is one of the most beautiful things in Mexico and it’s really important to keep these things alive and share it with our kids and everyone in Canada.”
