Introducing Panadería Brooklyn: Mexican Black-and-White Cookies

“Dozens of kosher restaurants, bakeries and cafes with Yiddish and Hebrew signs lined Brooklyn Avenue . . . The aroma of burritos and challah bread mingled outside greengrocers and bathhouses, union halls and movie houses. Mariachi and klezmer tunes drifted from apartment windows. Socialists and Zionists argued on street corners in Yiddish and Spanish.”—Reed Johnson, the Los Angeles Times

Personal History

I’ve written before about how I come from what is quite possibly the world’s least domestic line of Jewish women. My own mother is the first, and very probably last, stay-at-home mom; everyone has always had to work too hard to have the luxury of fetishizing domesticity in a baffling wave of faux nostalgia conveniently ignoring the fact that a typical meal for my ancestors probably consisted of a skimpy portion of brown bread, a slice of black radish, maybe a little herring and/or schmaltz on a good day (hey, you can’t say I don’t keep it real).

My grandmother was a kindergarten teacher, my great-grandmother was briefly a seamstress on the Lower East Side and then, after moving west, helped run the family liquor store in East LA; rumor has it that her own mother was a female schochet (kosher butcher) back in Poland, although it’s entirely likely that she really just worked in a butcher shop.

My maternal grandmother was an amazing woman, but a cook she decidedly was not—cold hot dogs were considered a passable meal when my mom and uncle were growing up. My great-grandmother was known to whip up the occasional batch of kreplach (soup dumplings) for the holidays, but that was about the extent of it. Exactly zero family recipes have been handed down to me.

I’ve heard a lot of the major players in today’s Jewish food scene speak nostalgically about their grandmother’s cooking and how that inspired them to preserve their respective food traditions. I don’t have that. Instead, I have Panadería Brooklyn, a (currently virtual) Mexican-Jewish bakery inspired by the East Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights, where my grandmother grew up.

This is a project I dreamed up with my dear friend Brigitte, an LA native (and current resident) whose Mexican family comes from neighboring Lincoln Heights. We’re both enthusiastic bakers who are passionate about our respective food traditions, and after she took me on a tour of Boyle Heights on a trip out west a few years back, Panadería Brooklyn was born.

Brigitte and me outside the Breed Street Shul in Boyle Heights, 2014

Boyle Heights

Why Panadería Brooklyn? As for the first part, “panadería” is bakery in Spanish, so that was kind of a no-brainer. But why Brooklyn? Boyle Heights’ main street was, for over a century, known as Brooklyn Avenue. In researching this post, I was surprised to find that it was named this not for its large Jewish population in the early 20^th century—at one time, the neighborhood had the highest concentration of Jews anywhere in the United States outside New York—but to attract newcomers from the east to what was, at the time of its naming in the 1870s, a new residential development.

In any case, the name was apt, since Boyle Heights was, from the 1920s to the 1940s, kind of like California’s Brooklyn. About 40% of the area’s population was Jewish at the time, and the first location of the famous Canter’s Deli (since relocated to Fairfax) opened its doors on Brooklyn Avenue in 1931.

My grandmother died young, in her early 60s. I was only four at the time, so I didn’t have the opportunity to learn much about her childhood directly from her. But by all accounts, Boyle Heights was a place where people of all different backgrounds—mostly, but by no means exclusively, Jewish, Mexican, and Japanese—lived, worked, and played together more or less harmoniously. A 1940 issue of the student newspaper from local public school Roosevelt High reveals that the school’s winning football team included players named both Kitioka and Reznikoff.

My grandmother certainly grew up to be someone who truly valued diversity, and while I can’t say how much of that came from her experiences growing up in Boyle Heights, I think it was an influence. A Los Angeles Times article deemed the neighborhood “multicultural before multicultural was cool,” and I think in a lot of ways she was too.

By the 1950s, most Boyle Heights Jews had moved further west—my family ended up in Hollywood, where my mom grew up—and the majority of the neighborhood’s population was Mexican. In honor of its role as the birthplace of the Chicano movement, Brooklyn Avenue was renamed for Mexican American civil rights leader César Chavez in 1994.

Today, the neighborhood remains mostly Latino and mostly working-class, but, as is the case seemingly everywhere, gentrification is coming. A somewhat controversial kosher restaurant even opened in the area earlier this year. This is obviously a complicated issue, about which I have more to say, but I’ll save that for another post so we can get to the food.

This is a planter box I spotted in Boyle Heights in 2014. It’s honestly one of my favorite things, ever, in life. I mean, look at it. Yup, that’s a rabbi…

And that’s a mariachi. See where this is going?

Yes, this is a Jewish-Mexican planter box!!! I can neither confirm nor deny that this thing helped inspire Panadería Brooklyn.

And we finish things off with a low rider. Classic.

Mexican Black-and-White Cookies

For the virtual launch of Panadería Brooklyn, I wanted something iconic. And what’s more iconic than the black-and-white cookie, a staple of American Jewish bakeries (even though it probably originated at the recently closed non-Jewish German Glaser’s Bake Shop on New York’s Upper East Side)?

But this isn’t just any black-and-white cookie. The cookie base is as you’d imagine it—soft and cakey, with just a hint of lemon—but the icings are like you’ve never tasted them before. The chocolate side is flavored like Mexican hot chocolate, with plenty of cinnamon and a little dash of cayenne for a surprising kick. And the white side? It’s flavored like horchata, the classic Mexican rice-based beverage.

I honestly wasn’t sure how these cookies would turn out when I first thought up the recipe. But they’re good. Really, really good. They were a hit with my coworkers, and even my father, who’s usually a skeptic when it comes to my cooking (standard line: “Did you put something weird in it?”), was a fan. These are a little bit of an undertaking to prepare, mostly because of the icing process, but if you have the time to settle down for a baking day they are really worth the effort.

The cookie base is slightly adapted from Brown Eyed Baker’s recipe.

If you have leftover horchata concentrate (and you probably will), water it down, add the sweetener of your choice, and enjoy it as a delicious drink.

Mexican Black-and-White Cookies

For the Horchata Concentrate

½ cup washed long-grain white rice

½ cup raw almonds

1 cup boiling water

½ cup cold water

1 tsp cinnamon

¼ tsp nutmeg

1 tsp vanilla

Blanch the almonds for 1 minute. Drain and let cool, then skin them—this sounds like a hassle, but post-boiling the skins really do just pop off.

Transfer rice, skinned almonds, cinnamon, and nutmeg into a blender. Add 1 cup boiling water. Cover and let sit, refrigerated, for at least 2 hours or up to overnight.

Add 1 cup cold water and vanilla and blend until smooth. Then strain in a nut milk bag. If you like, you can keep the solids and put them in smoothies/oatmeal/etc. Refrigerate the horchata concentrate until you are ready to use it.

For the Cookies

4 cups cake flour (don’t sub all purpose!)

½ teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

1 cup unsalted butter, at cool room temperature

1¾ cups granulated sugar

2 eggs, at room temperature

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

Zest of one lemon

1 cup milk

Adjust the oven racks to lower-middle and upper-middle positions and preheat the oven to 375° F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt; set aside.

Beat the butter at medium speed for 30 seconds. Keeping the mixer running, gradually add in the sugar and then increase the speed to medium-high and beat until the mixture is light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Scrape down the sides of the bowl and add the eggs, vanilla, and lemon zest. Beat at medium speed until combined, about 30 seconds. Scrape down the sides again. With mixer on low speed, alternately add the flour in four additions and the milk in three additions (beginning and ending with flour), and mix until just combined. Give the mixture a few final stirs with a spatula to ensure all of the flour has been incorporated.

Use a cookie scoop or, if you don’t have one, a ¼ cup measuring cup to scoop mounds of dough onto the prepared baking sheets about two inches apart. Using moistened fingers, gently press each mound of dough into a 2 ½-inch circle. Bake until the edges of the cookies are set and light golden brown, about 15 minutes. Allow the cookies to cool for 2 minutes on the baking sheets, then remove to a wire rack to cool completely.

For the Horchata Glaze

1 ¼ cup powdered sugar

2 tablespoons horchata concentrate

Whisk together in a small bowl until smooth.

For the Mexican Hot Chocolate Glaze

1 cup powdered sugar

2 tablespoons horchata concentrate

¼ cup Dutch processed cocoa powder

¼ teaspoon cayenne

½ teaspoon cinnamon

Whisk together in a small bowl until smooth.

Glazing Instruction

Place wire racks over wax paper to catch any drips. Use a small offset spatula to spread a thick coat of the vanilla icing onto half of each cookie. Use the spatula to scrape any excess from around the edges. Place the finished cookies on the wire racks and allow to set for at least 15 minutes.

Again using a small offset spatula, spread the chocolate icing on the half of each cookie, scraping any excess icing from around the edge of the cookies. Place the finished cookies on the wire racks and allow to set for at least 1 hour.

The cookies can be stored in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 3 days. If you stack the cookies, be sure to place a piece of wax paper between layers.

Sources: “The Afterlife of an East LA Shul,” Los Angeles Times (Reed Johnson, December 31, 2000);  Breed Street Shul Project; “Growing Up in Jewish Boyle Heights,” Jewish Journal (Tom Tugend, July 13, 2011); “Jewish Boyle Heights: The Past Meets the Future,” Hardcore Mesorah (Shmuel Gonzales, March 5, 2014); “Our Los Angeles Stories,” Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles (Summer and Fall 2003, Volume 23, Numbers 2 and 3); “The Shifting Cultures of Multiracial Boyle Heights,” KCET (Ryan Reft, August 9, 2013)