10/27/24

In Mexico (and a lot of the U.S.), families are busy preparing for Day of the Dead festivities. Truckloads of marigolds are arriving from Veracruz. Altars are being set out. And people everywhere are baking the traditional sweet bread, pan de muerto. In high school, we called it “dead bread,” but that sounds less appetizing. The more literal translation is “bread of the dead.”

Pan de muerto is delicious, but if you’re one of the 17% of Mexican adults with diabetes, enjoying it can be problematic. If you’re on a diet, it is yet another delicious temptation you have to sadly avoid.

Good news!

Thanks to beyondtype1.org, a fantastic website for diabetics, we have a recipe for sugar free pan de muerto! We cook-tested (and taste-tested) this recipe, and I am happy to share my experience with making it. (Link to the original recipe at the bottom of this post.) As an aside, I’m also going to post the Spanish version of this recipe in my local Facebook group, so maybe some of the other families in my pueblito can enjoy it. It’s too good not to share!

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Ingredients

Presented here with commentary. Full recipe reprinted at the bottom of this post.

– 1 cup of almond flour

– Two eggs

– 2 tablespoons of butter (I used salted and unsalted, either works fine)

– 2 tablespoons of cream cheese

– Two teaspoons of baking powder

– 1 tablespoon of monk fruit sweetener

– Orange zest (it didn’t say how much. I zested one orange and that seemed to work.)

– 1 pinch of salt

To decorate:

– 1 tablespoon of butter to glaze

– Powdered Monk Fruit sweetener or sifted Monk Fruit sweetener.

So far so good. I have all of these ingredients at the house. Almond flour used to be a lot harder to find in Mexico, but most of the big box grocery stores carry it now. I usually stock up at Costco but I’ve also seen it at La Comer, Chedraui, and Mega. My local mini supers don’t carry it but maybe they can order if if we start asking. And of course Amazon has it.

Same with monk fruit– it’s easier to find here than it was even a year ago. That makes me hopeful that Mexicans are starting to ask for healthier ingredients. By sharing the recipe with my town, I am taking one baby step in encouraging a food revolution that is so badly needed here. Mexicans consume a LOT of sugar, more than Americans, and it’s taking a toll on their health. (I’ll link to a very eye-opening article a friend of mine wrote in the References section below.)

Instructions

The instructions were generally easy to follow. I only got hung up on a few steps, and I’ll share what I did in italics.

1. Sift all the ingredients twice.

I admit, I am sometimes a lazy cook. While I do own a sifter, the first time I tried this recipe I completely ignored this step. I just mixed the dry ingredients together with a wooden spoon. The second time, I did sift, twice, just like the recipe said. I don’t think it made any difference. Sift or not, you do you.

2. Add the cream cheese and butter. (soften both ahead of time)

3. Stir the eggs with the orange zest.

4. Mix all the ingredients to form a compact dough.

Warning, the orange-egg mixture will make your dough more wet than you will be used to seeing in bread dough. You will question whether the recipe even needs it. It does.

5. Divide the dough into 5 parts.

6. Coat your hands with oil to prevent the dough from sticking and form three balls with three of the previously separated parts. Place them on a greased baking sheet or lined with parchment paper and flatten them a little.

Coating my hands with oil and handling dough is a little out of my comfort zone, but I did it. I used coconut oil, if that matters. And it was easy enough to roll 3 balls and flatten them gently on my parchment-covered baking sheet.

Full disclosure: I did this in a toaster oven, so it was not a full-sized baking sheet. But this recipe fit it perfectly. If you want more than three tiny breads, I would suggest doubling the recipe.

7. Divide the remaining dough into 15 parts. Use 3 of them to make small balls that will go in the center of each bread and 12 to make the bones that go on the Pan de Muerto arranging 4 on each bread to form an X.

Ok, I did not understand what to do here. The first time, I made the 3 small balls. But I’ve never seen this in photos of pan de muerto so I wasn’t sure where to put them. The first time, I just stuck them in the middle. The second time, I left them off entirely.

I also didn’t understand why I had to make 12 little sticks. Why couldn’t I just make 6 sticks, and arrange them like 3 pairs of X’s across the three balls of dough? That’s what the pictures looked like, so that’s what I did.

However, the first time I did it, the dough was so soft the X’s melted and they became the barest hint of an outline. The second time, I added a little almond flour to the X’s so they would keep their shape, and that worked. You can see the difference here.

But later….I went to a Day of the Dead celebration in Puerto Vallarta, and I saw a giant-sized model of what the Dead Bread was supposed to look like.

But I digress! Here is the rest of the sugar free pan de muerto process:

8. Preheat the oven to 320 ºF (160ºC).

9. Bake the bread for 20 to 25 minutes checking that it does not burn but making sure it is not raw either.

For this recipe, 20 minutes turned out to be not quite long enough, but both times my pan de muerto got nice and brown after 25 minutes.

10. Remove them from the oven and let them cool.

11. Glaze each bread with the melted butter.

Ok they have not said until this point that the butter needed to be melted, but because I don’t refrigerate butter it’s already pretty soft. The butter melted quickly as soon as it touched the bread.

12. Sprinkle with Monk Fruit powdered sugar or sifted sweetener.

I have monk fruit, but it’s not powdered. The granulated sugar worked perfectly fine.

The verdict: delicious. The orange zest imparts such a nice, unique flavor that it’s worth taking the trouble to zest (and clean the grater afterwards). The only issue is that this recipe doesn’t make a lot of pan de muerto, and between the two of us Lurko and I gobbled down all three breads very quickly. Totally worth it, though.

Full Recipe

Here is the full recipe for sugar free pan de muerto without commentary:

• 1 cup of almond flour
• 2 eggs
• 2 tablespoons of butter
• 2 tablespoons of cream cheese
• 2 teaspoons of baking powder
• 1 tablespoon of Monk Fruit sweetener
• Orange zest
• 1 pinch of salt

To decorate:

• 1 tablespoon of butter to glaze
• Powdered Monk Fruit sweetener or sifted Monk Fruit sweetener.

1. Sift all the ingredients twice.
2. Add the cream cheese and butter.
3. Stir the eggs with the orange zest.
4. Mix all the ingredients to form a compact dough.
5. Divide the dough into 5 parts.
6. Coat your hands with oil to prevent the dough from sticking and form three balls with three of the previously separated parts. Place them on a greased baking sheet or lined with parchment paper and flatten them a little.
7. Divide the remaining dough into 15 parts. Use 3 of them to make small balls that will go in the center of each bread and 12 to make the bones that go on the Pan de Muerto arranging 4 on each bread to form an X.
8. Preheat the oven to 320 ºF (160ºC).
9. Bake the bread for 20 to 25 minutes checking that it does not burn but making sure it is not raw either.
10. Remove them from the oven and let them cool.
11. Glaze each bread with the melted butter.
12. Sprinkle with Monk Fruit powdered sugar or sifted sweetener.

References

Here’s where I found the original recipe for sugar free pan de muerto. I highly recommend poking around this website, created by diabetics for diabetics. Their tips and recipes prove that you can eat healthy while still enjoying traditional foods and celebrations with your family.

Here is the same recipe in Spanish: https://es.beyondtype1.org/pan-de-muerto/

“The Real Thing” is an article about Mexican sugar consumption that one of my Substack friends wrote.

https://www.mexicolisto.com/p/the-real-thing

And here is some more information about Day of the Dead.

https://dayofthedead.holiday/#google_vignette