B&B Korean bakery offers familiar favorites and East Asian-style treats
Korean bakery in Burro Alley offers East Asian-style treats and a few familiar favorites
The first thing that happens when you walk into B&B Bakery is that Amanda Yang will hand you a free sample — or several. This is before any real explanation of what’s on offer, or before you’ve even had time to look around. She hands you a little square of something soft and bready, you put it in your mouth, you chew, and after that, you’re theirs.
B&B Bakery, Santa Fe’s new Korean bakery, is tucked away in a nook in the wall of downtown’s Burro Alley. The place is owned by Amanda Yang and Sky Yang, both originally from South Korea. They moved to New Mexico from California in January after Amanda Yang’s mother died and they wanted a change of scenery; a last-minute trip to visit a friend in Los Alamos sold them on the state. They intended to open their bakery in Los Alamos where they live, but had trouble finding a good location. Their loss and Santa Fe’s gain — they found the spot in Burro Alley through their church, the Los Alamos branch of the Santa Fe Korean Presbyterian Church on St. Francis Drive and Manhattan Avenue. B&B stands for “Bread and Butter.”
Sky Yang was a baker in South Korea for 10 years and then in Southern California for 10 years, which is about half as long as Koreans have been baking at all.
“Koreans have not been baking long; they took it from Japan, and Japan from Europe,” Sky Yang says. Baking and bakeries really only became popular in South Korea in the 1970s and ’80s, but East Asian baking is very much its own thing now, with its own distinctive flavor signature (a lot of sweetened condensed milk and bean pastes), recipes (milk bread, for example) and texture, which is often both denser than traditional European baked goods and yet, somehow, still light.
One distinctly East Asian offering is milk bread, baked in massive, perfectly rectangular loaves of ’50s-esque perfection. Milk bread is popular in Korea and Japan, a soft, fluffy loaf reminiscent of childhood
peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a bit sweeter and milkier than its processed white bread cousins. The texture supposedly comes from the water roux, or tangzhong, that forms the base, made by cooking one part bread flour to about five parts water together to form a paste, and it’s the secret to the distinctly dense-yet-fluffy texture of many Asian baked goods. The Yangs use this bread to make several of their other items, like green chile bread or triangle toast (milk bread sliced diagonally, drizzled with condensed milk, butter and sugar, and baked again to a golden brown).
Sky Yang also makes loaves of more Europeanstyle bread, though his are all entirely vegan, made without dairy or eggs, and he uses natural leavening, which takes about three hours longer than regular leavening to rise. But the result is soft, chewy, moist bread heaven. He currently bakes a country-style loaf, a slightly sweet raisin-walnut loaf and a savory olive walnut loaf that Yang likes to eat drizzled with balsamic vinegar.
In fact, the Yangs have made a point of including a high percentage of gluten-free and vegan items in their pastry case, all carefully marked — not because it’s traditional, because it’s not. It’s because Sky Yang wants to include anyone who wants to eat them, even people with Celiac disease.
“I want everybody to be able to enjoy one place,” Sky Yang says. “Sometimes at a gluten-eating person’s birthday party, a gluten-free person can’t have the cake.” Yang seeks to remedy this with his chiffon cakes, which are all gluten-free, jewel-like sculptures in red velvet, chocolate, green tea and strawberry, delicately and impeccably iced, made with a mixture of almond and rice flour.
The Yangs also make gluten-free madeleines that are virtually indistinguishable from the original, and gluten-free chocolate cookies. Plus, there are the macarons. The top row of the B&B pastry case is dedicated to the once-classic, now-trendy (and soon to be classic again) filled meringue cookies in a rainbow of flavors, like cookies and cream, hazelnut, blueberry, coffee, etc. Macarons, made with almond flour, also are traditionally gluten-free.
On the more traditional side, there are buns filled with Korean red bean paste (slightly sweeter than Chinese red bean paste) and soboro buns, made with a touch of peanut butter in a Danish pastry dough, topped with streusel and then cut in half and filled with heavy cream. Even the whipped cream recipe, which is slightly less sweet and involves a touch of liqueur, is more “traditionally” Korean. The Yangs also make pinwheels with green chile and slices of hotdog, a distinctly Korean treat, eggy Malaysian roti rolls and chewy black sesame balls made with tapioca starch.
Prices are reasonable (most things are about $2.50 to $4.50), and it’s hard not to walk out with a bag full of one of everything. No one will stop you if you do.