Postre Panchón

A few times a year, the residents of Aller break out this old-timey dessert. Made from Pan Panchón, it plays a starring role in several local festivals. The first appearance of postre panchón is the last weekend of August, during the village fiestas for Soto de Aller. It then appears again a couple of weeks later on September 8 – Día D’Asturies. And it makes a final appearance at the festival Los Humanitarios in Moreda every November.

In the rest of Spain, people would call these migas dulces, and several regional versions of similar recipes exist. Though, as the recipe for Migas del Niño Jesús from the Monasterio de Santa Clara de Almazán in Soria shows, it is dangerous to put too much stock in how a word is used in a recipe title. There the “migas” are not bread crumbs at all, but chopped bread, and the recipe is more of a bread pudding than the migas you might otherwise expect.

In Veracruz Mexico, el panchón most commonly refers to Carlos Francisco, a regional boss for the Los Zetas cartel. No word yet on whether Señor Francisco prefers sugar or honey on his postre.

As a dessert, postre panchón is stunningly simple. Crumble up days-old bread into tiny crumbs, and fry them with butter and either honey or sugar. To be honest, I am not sure if this really is a recipe in the strictest sense. It is more of a technique. It is a throwback to a time when most people did not have the luxury of simply disposing of things like stale bread. Calories were scarce, and waste was not just a sin, but potentially a mortal error.

And yet, despite it’s simplicity, it is a dish people rarely make these days. Perhaps we are now too sophisticated to look only to leftovers to build a new dish from. Not I however. I love simple dishes like postre panchón, and I make them often. You should too.

Ingredients

• 400 g pan panchón
• 200 g unsalted butter.
• 200 g honey.

Instructions

1. Take your bread, probably a couple days old, and render it into crumbs. The cheese-grating disc on a food processor will make short work of it, but it is almost as fast to use a box grater. You want nice chunky bread crumbs. You’re not trying to make fine crumbs like you’d use to coat battered things for frying.
2. Over medium-heat, melt the butter and honey together until you get a nice mixture. Raise the heat to medium high and add your breadcrumbs.
3. Stirring constantly, cook the crumbs until they have absorbed all the honey and butter and have started to brown a bit. 5 minutes should be enough time, but it can take as long as 10 minutes if your bread was very moist to begin with.
4. Spoon the crumbs into small bowls to serve. Eat warm.