New-Wave Bakeries Are on the Rise in Puerto Rico

Soft, doughy pan sobao is ubiquitous in Puerto Rico. The popular sweet bread is sold in almost every bakery, supermarket, and corner colmadito. Even some gas stations sell previously frozen loaves in heated display cases. Locals use it for everything: toast, sandwiches, a plain slice skewered at the end of a chicken pincho to soak up drippings. It’s as Puerto Rican as lechón asado, mofongo, or pasteles.

Pan sobao is iconic, not only because it’s widespread and has deep roots in the island’s Spanish baking traditions, but also because it’s symbolic of everything that went wrong with Puerto Rico’s industrial baking system.

“The common pan sobao experience today is enriched, bleached flour mixed with vegetable shortening, tons of sugar, tons of leavening agents so the bread grows quickly. It’s generally underbaked so that you get that doughy texture inside,” says Diego San Miguel, who opened Panoteca San Miguel in 2021 in the Río Piedras neighborhood of San Juan. “So many people eat it, but no one is questioning the methods. Nobody says, ‘Hey, this isn’t done right.’”

In 2016, San Miguel started making bread in a second-hand pizza oven from a small ghost kitchen in Cupey, joining a generation of inspired Puerto Rican bakers who have begun offering an alternative to the bread factories: sourdoughs, country loaves, pastries with actual fresh creams and local fruit. While this might just seem like the belated arrival of baking trends from the U.S., Puerto Rican bakers face unique challenges sourcing ingredients and battling lingering cultural stigmas — but they’ve also developed new baking traditions reflecting the island’s own foodways.

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Wheat arrived in Puerto Rico with Spanish colonizers in the early 16th century. Over time, Spanish bakers settled around the island, building brick ovens and baking breads and sweet buns from various regions of Spain. A few panaderías still bake with those original brick ovens today, and it’s common to find a bakery in every town square selling variations of criollo bread (pan de agua), sweets such as quesitos, and of course, pan sobao.

With the industrialization of food production in the 1940s and ’50s, Puerto Ricans began consuming more processed foods alongside other U.S. consumers. Bread baking turned into an industrial task without emphasis on ingredients or fermentation, while pastries were assembled with pre-made mixes and creams. Bakeries changed traditional recipes in the name of health, but often made things worse; by the 1970s, pork lard, a key ingredient in pan sobao, was condemned as unhealthy, but it was substituted with hydrogenated vegetable shortening completely stripped of nutritional value. Puerto Ricans grew accustomed to insipid tornillos with dense pastry cream and breads that stayed soft for days.

The nascent movement to counter these legacies began with María Isabel Laborde. In 2000, she left Puerto Rico to train as a baker in the Dominican Republic; upon her return, she saw her breads weren’t turning out the same due to the addition of other ingredients such as potassium bromate in flour milled in Puerto Rico. The inorganic chemical compound is a known carcinogen, causes gastrointestinal issues, and is banned in many countries around the world, but is still used in the U.S. and Puerto Rico to improve dough. She started speaking up about this kind of chemical additive and selling sourdough bread made with organic flour.

Other bakers followed, but it’s been an uphill battle. Puerto Ricans may love their bread, but most people haven’t been much interested in how it was baked. According to lawyer-turned-baker Carlos Ruiz, many customers prioritized convenience over quality when he opened El Horno de Pane in the Hato Rey district of San Juan in 2016.

“People would arrive at 3 p.m. and say, ‘Oh, you don’t have anything left!’ because they are used to going to bakeries that always have a stocked display,” says. “People would get angry with me, to the point of insulting me: ‘You don’t know what you’re doing! How is it possible that there’s nothing left at this time?’ Because everything is made fresh daily, from scratch.”

“Here in Puerto Rico, when you say you’re a bread baker people look down on you,” says San Miguel, who began his career at Panadería Morales in Gurabo, where he experienced the industrial approach to baking. It wasn’t until he spent a year working in France that he witnessed seasoned bakers who proudly dedicated their lives to their craft.

Seeking instruction outside of Puerto Rico has proven crucial to many of the island’s best contemporary bakers, including Ruiz and José Rodriguez, who started Levain Artisan Breads in 2009 after completing the bread program at the International Culinary Center in New York. He has since opened bakeries in Aguadilla and Santurce, all while taking baking workshops around the globe.

These experiences abroad have come to define bakers’ offerings. San Miguel experiments with airy Italian maritozzi, Rodriguez has become known for his croissants, and Ruiz lists almond croissants and kouign amanns among his best sellers. The impact is even clearer for Lucía Merino. As a young pastry cook in Miami, Merino trained with a master pastry chef who inspired her to pursue patisserie. After working in Spain and Dallas, she returned home to concentrate on her passion, which includes laminated dough and pate au choux, at Lucía Patisserie, a bakery inspired by French techniques in the Miramar neighborhood of San Juan. (Note: Lucía Merino is the sister of Camila Merino, who has also worked at Lucía Patisserie.)

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Though bakers’ hearts lie in French boulangeries and Italian pasticcerias, they have to deal with sourcing ingredients in Puerto Rico. As a commonwealth of the United States, Puerto Rico imports over 80 percent of its food. Due to the Marine Merchant Act of 1920, also known as the Jones Act, goods have to be delivered to the island on U.S. flagged ships, causing hefty markups and limiting supply.

When she set out to bake bread commercially, Laborde tried ineffectively to get a local Dawn Foods sales rep to bring King Arthur’s organic flours to the island.

“I think the lady didn’t like me from the get-go. She kept saying that flour goes bad quickly and is expensive, that nobody would buy it,” Laborde says. “I told her I’d buy the entire pallet. Maybe she didn’t believe me.”

Laborde personally hired a courier out of Florida to deliver King Arthur from North Carolina. It made the premium raw material even more costly, but it laid the groundwork for Rodriguez, who convinced the same rep to import King Arthur a few years later. (The flour was crucial for the sourdough pizza shops that subsequently popped up across the capital, proving Laborde right about demand.)

But moderate successes haven’t quelled anxiety. When Russia invaded Ukraine, wheat became more expensive and bakers noticed a dip in quality. At one point, Ruiz paid $290 to ship a $100 bag of flour to Puerto Rico. The same unbromated flour that kicked off Puerto Rico’s neo-baking wave has also become hard to get; shipments can get delayed or sell out quickly.

Other ingredients are just as finicky. On more than one occasion, Ruiz has been down to his last box of European butter, joking nervously that he was “close to pressing the panic button.” Merino also struggles to get ingredients like nuts and chocolate, and her delicate pastries don’t respond well to sudden disruptions in ingredient supply.

“We plan our weekly menu and order ingredients intended for our production, but then some items never make it or the quality is not what it should be,” she says. “It can be very stressful.”

The limitations have forced bakers to get creative. When he couldn’t get his hands on European-style butter, Rodriguez did his best to mimic it, processing the local variety to reduce its water and increase its fat percentage (though he ultimately switched to butter ordered straight from France — via New Jersey — due to inconsistencies in the homemade version).

The team at Lucía Patisserie had more success making their own hazelnut praline when they couldn’t source it. They also opt to make their own versions of expensive ingredients such as vanilla extract.

Though bakers may bemoan their lack of access to European ingredients, they’ve also learned to celebrate the bounty in their own backyard. Local eggs are typically significantly more expensive than imported options, but one local egg typically yields the equivalent of 1.5 to 2 U.S. eggs, and bakers prefer their quality. Panoteca San Miguel showcases local fruits such as pomarrosa and passionfruit in pastries. When a friendly neighbor in Aguadilla donated his entire crop of fresh guayabas, the Levain team made jam and combined it with local queso fresco for a danish that flew off the display case.

“Any pastry we make with fresh local fruit sells very well,” says Merino. She works with farmers to source limes, ginger, hibiscus, and watermelon for juices; herbs, eggplant, and squash for savory galettes; passionfruit for macarons; mango for tarts, and more. For Thanksgiving, Lucía Patisserie processed over 400 pounds of local pumpkins for pies.

“It’s our responsibility to show [farmers] there is demand for their products and we are willing to pay them what they need if we want to see a change in our island’s reliance on imports,” she adds.

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The same European techniques and pastries that proved crucial as inspiration for bakers can also turn off some customers, who may feel intimidated at first by unfamiliar products, Rodriguez says. So incorporating familiar flavors has also proven key to winning over apprehensive locals.

“Our customers will always purchase pastries that taste like [Puerto Rican] classics,” Merino says. Beyond using local fruits in pastries, she sells a Croixito, a croissant-based pastry inspired by a traditional quesito, and a popular hand pie filled with picadillo and sweet plantain. Lately, she’s been experimenting with crispy puff pastry to bring other bakery staples to life, such as napoleons and pastelillos.

Using Puerto Rico’s own flavors isn’t just a savvy business decision. It’s also part of a larger push to create a local, self-sustaining baking culture full of pride for Puerto Rico’s own traditions. “The Puerto Rican breads have gotten a bad rep and are sometimes considered inferior to European breads, but they aren’t. The problem is the method and the ingredients,” San Miguel says.

Pioneering bakers had to travel the world to learn their craft, but they’d like that to change for the next generation, so that education isn’t restricted to those with the means to study abroad. Rodriguez has been hosting baking workshops throughout Puerto Rico, and he and Laborde have both looked into opening permanent baking schools.

“People depend on these breads now,” says Laborde, who regularly sells out her loaves at her restaurant, Peace n Loaf, in her hometown, the central mountain pueblo of Cayey. “That’s why we need more bakers.”

Their persistence is paying off. Bakeries are grateful their craft has been embraced by a growing local fan base, as well as Puerto Ricans in the diaspora and foreign visitors. And a younger generation of bakers are opening their own creative micro-bakeries, such as Mugi Pan, a micro-bakery inspired by Japanese and French techniques.

San Miguel even revived the beleaguered pan sobao with local organic lard, eggs, and honey.

“It was incredible. It tasted just like the pan sobao we know,” he says, “but it was done right.”

Camila Merino is a freelance writer from San Juan, Puerto Rico, and has worked in food and service for almost 10 years.

Johan Villafañe Lopez