Pan de Mallorca

A bakery spiral

Pan de Mallorca is a sweet bread found in Puerto Rican bakeries. This SBS home recipe rolls buttered dough into a log and bakes nine slices together; other recipes shape separate coils.

A San Juan bakery bread

Pan de Mallorca connects Puerto Rican café food with the spiral ensaïmada of Mallorca in the Balearic Islands. Illyana Maisonet’s 2019 reporting traces one bakery lineage to Antonio Rigo, who brought his family recipe from Felanitx to Puerto Rico in 1900 and opened a bakery within two years. That business later became La Bombonera.

In Puerto Rico, the sweet roll also became a griddled sandwich bread, including ham-and-cheese versions. This bakery account documents one route and a later serving custom. It does not establish that Rigo made the first mallorca anywhere in Puerto Rico, or settle the earlier origins of the Spanish ensaïmada.

A bread carried beyond the island

Maisonet also interviewed Puerto Rican baker Diego Martin-Perez in New Orleans. He recalled mallorcas as an after-school snack and baked a version using wild yeast and freshly milled grain. His recollection shows how a familiar bakery food can carry personal memories while its recipe changes in a new workplace.

Another baker, Charissa Del Valle, describes researching Puerto Rican recipes to connect with her father’s heritage after growing up in a Puerto Rican-Filipino family in California. The Savor interview places pan de Mallorca within that search. It is one baker’s family experience, rather than a definition of how everyone in the diaspora relates to the bread.

The nine-roll version here

The SBS method turns a buttered rectangle into a log, then cuts nine slices to rise and bake together in a square pan. Other documented versions form individual coils. The joined arrangement is part of this recipe’s shaping method, not a claim that every Puerto Rican bakery makes the same form.

The dough includes milk, egg yolks and butter, followed by an icing-sugar finish. Guava paste is an optional accompaniment in the selected source. The sandwich uses described elsewhere do not add meat or cheese to this dough, and the wild-yeast bakery account does not replace the dried yeast or rise schedule here.