Why pugon-baked pan de suelo so special in Kamuning Bakery since 1939?

Why the pugon-baked pan de suelo so special at Kamuning Bakery since 1939?

(Photo taken by phone camera of writer & pan de suelo admirer Wilson Lee Flores)

(Dr. Doreen G. Fernandez photo by Stella Kalaw, source is the website of the Ateneo de Manila University)

The late foremost food critic, book author, columnist and outstanding educator Professor Dr. Doreen Gamboa Fernandez, a suki or long-time loyal buyer of Kamuning Bakery’s pan de suelo, pan de sal and other pastries, wrote that the pan de sal is the bread of our history, at the core of Philippine culture, at the heart of our tastes. She particularly liked Kamuning Bakery’s pan de suelo which she described extensively in her 2000 book on Filipino cuisine entitled Palayok: Philippine Food Through Time, On Site, In the Pot.

National Artist for Literature N. V. M. Gonzalez called it “the bread of salt”, and wonders: “How did it get that name? From where did its flavor come; through what secret action of flour and yeast? … Why did the bread come nut-brown and the size of my little fist? And why did it have a pair of lips convulsed into a painful frown?”

Prof. Doreen Fernandez wrote: “Those lips, that frown, are what mark the old-fashioned pan de suelo, bread baked on the floor of the old-fashioned ovens and not on sheets, sent in and brought out on long flat wooden spades. For some mysterious reason, bread so baked develops a ridge, a crack, and thus is also called putok in the provinces. At the Kamuning Bakery in Cubao (43 Judge Jimenez Street corner K-1^st Street, tel: 9292216, 7945045), the pan de suelo or pan de sal na putok still lives…”

After enumerating the many diverse breads and other pugon-baked pastries of circa 1939 Kamuning Bakery, Prof. Doreen Fernandez wrote: “But it is the pan de suelo that wins the customers and earns the bread (pardon the pun). Some 5,000 pieces are baked daily on ordinary days---the undisputed bestseller. Customers include children, mothers with babes in arms, housewives in slippers, career girls in high heels, distinguished old gentlemen (who come in chauffer-driven cars), young boys and errands, car-driving women buying multiples of 10-bun packs, once President Cory Aquino herself, not her usual a driver or maid.”

How to eat the pan de suelo in diverse ways

Fernandez added: “Eat it hot; eat it cold. Freeze it and take it to relatives in the U.S. (it keeps for months, even a year, it is rumoured). Halve it, hollow out the miga, fill and bake with olive oil and chorizo, and it is a Spanish breakfast. Tear it up and eat it with mouthfuls of tapa and itlog, or with menudo, and it is a Filipino breakfast. Butter it and have it with jam, and it is continental; or with ham and eggs, and it is American. Serve it hot with slices of jamon China and kesong puti, and it’s a party. It has even been known to contain ice-cream or bananas.”

National Artist for Literature N. V. M. Gonzalez

(President Cory C. Aquino photo by Lilen Uy, source is Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism)

The respected 16-time Palanca literary award winner, novelist, poet and educator Butch Dalisay wrote in his Philippine Star column said of Kamuning Bakery’s pan de suelo: “Indeed it was all the crunchy goodness.”

Multi-awarded writer and educator Butch Dalisay

According to scholar and book author Felice Prudente Sta. Maria, there were two kinds of pan de sal that once reigned in the Filipino bread basket. The traditional and more respected of the pair was known as the pan de suelo.

Top scholar and book author Felice Prudente Sta. Maria

During the Spanish colonial era, dough was baked on the suelo or Spanish word for the “floor” of the pugon (wood-fire brick oven) thereby making crusts very crisp and hard which to according to National Artist for Literature Nick Joaquin “colegialas got their gums toughened on their segundo almuerzo in the morning and, with hot chocolate, their meriendas in the afternoon.”   

National Artist for Literature Nick Joaquin