Making homemade concha rolls for the first time

I’ve mentioned a few times that I’m a big fan of conchas — they’re round, fluffy Mexican sweet rolls covered in a quilted or striped sugar topping. When I first moved to Mexico City, I was so amazed by them (they’re sold in the U.S., but are rarely any good there) that I lauched a concha taste test to identify the best concha in Mexico City. The test is still ongoing.

A few weeks ago, I was rushing in late to cooking class when I realized that our guest instructor for the day was a professional baker. He casually mentioned that we were going to make conchas, which made me feel like being on The Price is Right and watching the door open to reveal a new car. We were going to make conchas! For the first time!

Back in the kitchen, he passed out the recipes and quickly walked us through the method. We would start with a sponge, called a “masa madre” in Spanish. We’d combine water, yeast and flour, and let the sponge rise for 15 to 20 minutes while we worked on the main dough. After the conchas, we’d make an anise and piloncillo-based sweet roll called a cocol.

Everything moved very quickly, much quicker than the pace of our normal class. We divided up into four teams and immediately started weighing our flour and yeast for the sponge. I suddenly felt the need to take charge, so I grabbed our bag of flour and headed to the scale, while everyone else on my team set up a strategy for the remaining ingredients. Sifting the flour wasn’t explicitly mandated in the directions, so I asked the chef.

“Flour must always be sifted, it’s a matter of hygiene,” he informed me.

Okay. Didn’t know that.

We mixed our flour and yeast, and added just enough water to make the dough come together. Then the masa madre went into a lightly warm oven for 20 minutes to double in size. This is much shorter than I normally leave things to rise. Actually, I never even make a sponge, which may explain why my Mexican bread rises only half the time.

While the sponge lay fermenting, we mixed the rest of our dough: more flour and yeast, eggs, salt, baking powder and water. I mixed the eggs, salt and yeast first, and then added half the flour and began kneading with my hands.

“Does anyone else want to do this?” I asked my group. They shook their heads.

We retrieved the masa madre from the oven and added it in pieces to the dough. Once that was incorporated, we got out the butter. A lot of butter — nearly three American sticks worth. Grabbing chunks of butter at a time, I squished the creamy paste into the dough with my hands, relishing in how everything just kind of smeared together like Play-Doh.

We didn’t add all the butter at my insistence. The dough seemed moist enough. (Almost three sticks of butter. Three sticks.) But our teacher came over and saw our extra butter sitting to the side. He quickly added it to our mixing bowl himself.

“Keep going,” he said.

We added the sugar at the end, which the chef had specifically advised, as to not adversely affect the yeast. Then we placed the dough in the KitchenAid mixer and flipped the switch.

Usually I eschew a mixer in bread-baking in favor of my own hands. But as the dough hook yanked and somersaulted and twisted our masa, it became apparent that this mixer was doing a much better job than I ever did. (Reason #2, possibly, why my bread in Mexico has never turned out very well.) After perhaps five minutes of mixing, the dough had become a smooth, elastic, pale yellow ball. A bundled baby blanket, really, that I wanted to nuzzle against my cheek.

I’d made some great doughs before moving to Mexico — who could forget my jalapeño cheese bread, which I brought warm and wrapped in foil to a Feist show in Dallas — but this was the most perfect dough I’d seen, maybe ever.

It went back in the oven to rise, in a stainless steel mixing bowl covered in plastic wrap. Then we got to work on our topping.

Now, based on gustatory evidence alone, I’d assumed the concha topping was a mix of butter and sugar. This concha topping had no butter. It was comprised of confectioner’s sugar, vegetable shortening and flour. Like, one part vegetable shortening, one part sugar, two parts flour. That means it was nearly 1/3 vegetable shortening. (Or something like that. My math skills are bad.) Still: this was a lot of tasteless fat.

William, a Mexican classmate, was aghast. He said he always thought the concha topping contained only sugar.

“Me traumé!” he exclaimed. I’m traumatized!

I felt his pain, or at least at first I did. Conchas were truly disgusting, when you examined them by the topping alone. But the upper half is what made them so good. You could not have a concha without it. I decided I would love conchas anyway, more fiercely than before, because now I knew exactly what they were made of.

We whipped our vegetable shortening and confectioner’s sugar (Spanish name = “azúcar glass”) in the Kitchen-Aid, and added the flour to make it a paste. To form our conchas, we cut the dough in half and rolled each half into thick ropes. Then we cut the ropes into evenly shaped, small pieces. Each one would eventually become a roll, after another round of rising.

Once we had our pieces, we rolled them one at a time on the counter, cupping our hands into a C-shape and forming them into a ball with our palms. It was kind of like using a roller-ball video game controller. The key was just to keep rolling, and to not get frustrated and use any flour. (“Do not use any flour during this part,” the chef stressed.)

After that, we greased our hands with more vegetable shortening and gave each roll a tap on the head. (This would help the topping stick.) Using floured fingers, we grabbed a chunk of topping from the mixing bowl and flattened it into a pancake. We pressed the pancake onto the concha, like a little hat. A light press with a cookie cutter gave the concha its distinctive criss-cross marks.

Once we had a few on the cookie sheet, I stopped and stared. Here was a concha just like the ones I’ve eaten, and I made it myself! I couldn’t help smiling, which I’m sure made my classmates think I was a bit of a loon.

Maybe I stopped and stared too long, because ours were the last baking sheets to make it in the oven. My team didn’t make it out of class until nearly 11:30 p.m.

One batch of conchas fell flat, because the oven wasn’t hot enough, no doubt due to constant opening and closing of the oven door. (Other classmates had to retrieve their rolls before us.) But our second batch of conchas was just… life-changing. The vegetable shortening topping, which had seemed a bit lardy and crude when we put it in the oven, had transformed into this svelte, dynamic decoration: dense, lightly sweet, almost powdery. The roll, warm and doughy from the oven, just kind of wrapped itself around your tongue. I couldn’t get enough. I ate a whole one right there, and then another half when I get home at midnight.

And then I ate another one at 8 a.m. the next morning.

Yes, my pants still fit.

I can’t wait to make them again. Here’s a picture of my prettiest concha, which I ate two mornings after baking it. (It was still good.)