Horno Bread Recipe

We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. Please also read our Privacy Notice and Terms of Use, which became effective December 20, 2019.

Traditional Native American foods weren’t a big part of my childhood on the Navajo Nation reservation in Crownpoint, New Mexico. For the most part, our plates were filled with simple, subsistence stuff: potatoes, ground beef, rice, canned vegetables. Few of the dishes we ate left much of a dent in my memory, nor were they meant to. But then there was Pueblo bread.

In our house, sturdy soups and stews like chicken and rice, red chile pozole, or slow-cooked chili beans would sometimes be accompanied by what we call

Philips Breadmaker Hd9045 Review (and Milk Bread Recipe!)

Bread. (“Kiis’áanii” is the Navajo word for the Pueblo people.) Made from white flour, enriched with a little butter or lard, and flavored with a pinch of salt, this moist, puffy bread starts out as a large domed loaf that’s often split into a variety of small sections before baking. It’s traditionally, but not exclusively, cooked in an outdoor beehive-shaped clay oven known as a

. The finished bread has a tough crust, a dense crumb, and a velvety mouthfeel. It’s beautiful in its spareness — an elemental thing.

Back in what my relatives still refer to as “the wagon days, ” my great-great-grandmother and her family would pack up their wagon with rugs and mutton to trade with the Laguna Pueblos. It was a three-day journey, but the payoff was fluffy Pueblo bread and stew for days. I’m lucky: I can have a loaf in my grasp with little more than a seven-minute drive to the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center.

Colombian Baked Flank Steak (sobrebarriga Al Horno)

I moved from Crownpoint to Albuquerque several years back, and Pueblo bread still makes an occasional appearance at my dining table, next to over-medium eggs in the morning and mutton stew for special occasions. I’ve never dared to make it myself though — a recipe perfected by generations of Pueblo bread makers, no online recipe could hope to replicate that kind of time-earned finesse. It’s known across Native populations that Pueblos do it best, and I do just fine shelling out a few dollars for a loaf every now and then.

But as much as I love this bread, I’ve really only ever had one style of it. The kind from Laguna Pueblo that I ate growing up was known as “elephant toes, ” because it resembled an elephant’s foot. But there are 19 different Pueblo nations in New Mexico, each with its own particular version of bread molded by generations-old family techniques, ingredients, and the flair of individual bakers.

Two years ago, I created the Toasted Sister Podcast, a show about Indigenous food, to learn more about why our people eat the way we do. Like many of the world’s most delicious things, unique riffs on Pueblo bread tend to be well-guarded secrets, but I wanted to visit at least a few different bakers, and see for myself how varied the tradition of Pueblo bread-making could be — and why, after hundreds of years, the Pueblo people continue putting in the hard work to make it.

Santa Fe Day Trips

My quest began in Jemez Pueblo, 47 miles north of Albuquerque, where the hilly desert ends and the river introduces you to the Jemez Mountains. At the Jemez Pueblo government building I met Dorell Toya-Upshaw, who is part of a long lineage of local bakers, and whose mother is famous for her Pueblo bread. Toya-Upshaw was waiting in her dusty blue van; she signaled for me to follow an unpaved road through a maze of decades-old adobe homes, most with satellite dishes on the roof, clotheslines in the back, and gently sloping hornos to the side.

Two minutes off the main road, we arrived at the single-story adobe house that Toya-Upshaw and her family call home. It was about 100 degrees inside the house with the wood stove and oven going in her kitchen — perfect conditions for allowing the dough to rise. It was here that Toya-Upshaw introduced me to her mother, Lyda Toya.

Toya’s petite frame seemed all the more diminished by an enormous dining table almost entirely covered with bowls of bread dough, cookie dough, sugar, baking pans, and some lard in a small cardboard box. With a heap of jet-black hair piled fashionably on top of her head, Toya immediately started portioning a mound of puffy dough into smaller pieces. Then, with greased hands, she formed some of the dough into balls, pressed some into loaf pans, and cut slits into others. The latter shape is called a flower because, in baking, the bread opens up, as if blossoming. It looked nothing like the elaborate elephant toes I grew up eating, so I asked Toya if her shapes had any specific cultural meaning. She shook her head. “It’s just our decoration.”

Enriched Dough — Recipe Of The Week — Beans & Sardines

Toya learned everything she knows about baking from her own mother and aunties, and has perfected the art over a lifetime of regular practice. The batch of bread she made for me was small compared to the usual dozen or so loaves she bakes twice week to sell at the nearby Walatowa Convenience Store on New Mexico State Road 4. Toya’s been known to make up to four times that for feast days — Pueblo religious holidays commemorating Catholic saints. That means working through about 100 pounds of dough. “We use the bread to feed our [Pueblo] families and to feed a lot of Navajo friends that come over, ” said Toya. “And when they go home, we give them stuff to take with them — bread, cookies, and pies. That’s why we make extra.”

As we waited for the bread to finish, we talked excitedly about other Jemez foods, like the famous enchiladas with a large handmade tortilla wrapped around melted cheese and drenched in red chile sauce, and the sweet cornmeal dessert known generally as Indian pudding. Gradually the warm, yeasty smell of bread began to fill the house and, without the aid of a timer, Toya opened the oven and pulled out a myriad of domed and split loaves that were evenly golden on the top and bottom. They were smaller than the ones I remembered, but they tasted very much the same — rich and savory, with a lingering sweetness.

Toya continued to pull the steaming results of her handiwork from the oven, with her daughter, Toya-Upshaw, watching closely by her side. “Bread is a big traditional food, ” Toya-Upshaw told me. “It is the source of our survival.” She was speaking both of the vital financial support the bread provides, but also how baking and eating it can be an act of cultural preservation.

No Knead White Bread Wreath

As I got ready to leave, the Toyas invited me back for their next feast day, and filled the trunk of my car with bread and cookies. The scent of toasted yeast mingled with my coconut air freshener over the two-and-a-half-hour drive to Taos, the next stop on my bread pilgrimage, and the home of one of the few Native-owned restaurants in the country.

While Pueblo bread is seen today as an important part of the local food and culture, its roots are not entirely indigenous. Before the introduction of flour, Pueblos and many tribes across the continent used ground nuts, corn, and beans to bind ingredients into simple breads and cakes. “When the Spanish came in the late 1500s, they brought wheat with them, ” says Jon Ghahate, a museum cultural educator for the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, as well as the horno.

Essential ingredients like lard, butter, and milk didn’t make their way to the Pueblos until the late 19th century, when Americans forced the native peoples onto reservations and began doling out food rations. Yeast found its way into the recipe around this time as well, which, according to Ghahate, is when the Pueblo bread we know today began to take shape. “It’s certainly seen as a traditional food now, ” he says.

El Cuate's Great Gorditas De Horno

As much as Pueblo bread is loved by its people, it is also one of the many small reminders of colonization that Native Americans experience in their everyday lives. There’s also the ubiquitous fry bread, a controversial food that may have become part of our people’s story, but not by choice. Many in the Native community today are having tough conversations about what kind of impact these introduced foods have had on our society’s culture and overall health.

The road from Jemez to Taos winds upward through tall pines that provide shade for patches of stubborn snow that have collected in late fall, and through the Valles Caldera National Preserve, a stunning 13-mile valley dug into the mountaintops. The quick transition from rugged desert to grassy high-altitude haven is quintessential New Mexico terrain, the ancestral Native land that our people have called home since time immemorial.

I broke through the forest and drove through the San Ildefonso,

Sweet Butter Bread (bread Machine) Recipe