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 Kiis’áanii 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 horno. 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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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, Pojoaque, and Ohkay Owingeh pueblos to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains where the town of Taos sits, just next to Taos Pueblo. The Pueblo itself, a multistory adobe structure surrounded by smaller adobe houses, has been inhabited for at least a millennium, and was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992. The area is dotted with hornos, and there’s no shortage of bread for sale in the ancient homes turned tourist shops on the outskirts of the main square. Just a short drive outside of the Pueblo is Tiwa Kitchen, one of only a few Native-owned restaurants in the entire country.

Tiwa Kitchen is run by local couple Debbie and Ben Sandoval; their menu includes local trout, bison burgers, Indian tacos (fry bread topped with taco ingredients), regional produce, and baked goods, including Pueblo bread and pastries from the horno. Debbie built the oven with help from her husband and mother-in-law. “If you make it, then you know it,” she said, pointing out the various hot spots and quirks she takes into account for the perfect bake.

The breads Debbie Sandoval pulls from the oven’s half-moon opening each day differ from those piled in my trunk from Jemez, and from the elephant toes of my youth. Smaller, and bronzed a deep golden brown, the shapes here are the most elemental I’ve seen — simple curved loaves and round clusters of dinner rolls — but the taste and texture of the crumb is familiar.

“The bread is the root of everything,” said Debbie. “We bake it for every funeral, every initiation into the kiva,” a spiritual space for Pueblo gatherings. “Whenever there’s a celebration, it involves the bread.” Bread is also an important economic tool for the Pueblo people. At $3 to $8 a loaf, its sales can be key source of income for families.

Pueblo bread is one of several dishes the Sandovals have been serving for the last 25 years at the restaurant they opened to answer the question many tourists had as they visited Taos Pueblo: Where can we eat? But the business has evolved into something more — rare not just in the region, but across the country. At Tiwa Kitchen, diners experience the local ingredients and classic flavors of Native cooking, making it an important player in the effort to revive and preserve these culinary traditions.

Every Saturday at the local flea market in Gallup, New Mexico, you’ll find Jimmy Paywa and his wife, Marlene, manning a long table piled with baked goods. Their stall is one of several at the market, which acts as a showcase for different varieties of Pueblo breads: Zuni, Santo Domingo, Acoma, and Laguna, to name a few.

The Paywas have been making Zuni bread for nearly two decades at their home 40 miles south of Gallup in the Zuni Pueblo, a one-highway town surrounded by white and red mesas. It’s the westernmost Pueblo in New Mexico where the people speak Zuni, a unique language by linguistic standards — it’s considered an isolate, with no demonstrable relationship to other languages — and they bake a style of Pueblo bread that’s just as singular.

The house is located on Paywa Road, which was most likely named for the family. It doubles as a commercial bakery, with a professional mixer and a large stainless steel-topped island in the kitchen. A back room is for cooling and bagging fresh loaves. The Paywas regularly give tours of their bread-making process and show off their massive horno, which experts have called the largest in New Mexico, easily the size of three regular-sized hornos and about 8 feet across. “You can fit up to 100 loaves,” said Jimmy. “We put [in] 85 to 88.”

The weekly breadmaking ritual begins when the horno is lit at 7 a.m. “It takes about three wheelbarrows full of wood to heat it up,” said Jimmy. The art of preparing a horno is pretty much standard across Pueblos: Once the firewood is burned down, the flames recede and the oven reaches the ideal temperature of around 450 degrees; the hot coals are removed with custom-made tools; and the ashes are cleaned off the floor of the oven with soaking-wet juniper branches. The loaves go in and the oven is sealed shut with a wooden board and wet towels stuffed into the cracks.

“We’ve got sourdough and regular yeast bread,” said Jimmy. He, like Lyda Toya, doesn’t use a timer, or at least I didn’t see one. After 17 years he bakes by feel, a skill he learned from his parents. “My father used to be sort of embarrassed because the women are the people that traditionally do the bread,” he said. “But he finally got over that. He’d clean the oven and put in the dough while my mom and the daughters would mix it. And then they’d all get into an old bus and take the bread to the flea market and sell it every Saturday.”

When Jimmy sensed the bread was ready, he reopened the oven and inspected the color of the loaves — golden. He took one out to make sure it sounded hollow when he tapped on it with his knuckles, then used a long baker’s peel to transfer the fresh loaves to a table where Marlene was waiting. She picked them up with heat-proof gloves and placed them into large plastic tubs.

I asked about the variety of shapes — far more intricate than what I saw in Jemez and Taos, each with its own petals, splits, and points. Jimmy explained they’re shaped like that because a long time ago, the splits made the bread easier to tear apart instead of messing around with knives and cutting boards. One particularly striking version looked a bit like an old-fashioned baseball mitt, with six finger-like sections and a few jutting points.

“People call this shape the bear claw, dinosaur foot, or the Dolly Parton,” he said.

“Why Dolly Parton?” I asked.

“Because of the lobes on there.” He laughed.

I’ve been calling Zuni bread “Dolly Parton” ever since.

Just off Interstate 40 in the small town of Casa Blanca, New Mexico, is the Dancing Eagle Casino, shaped like a large circus tent and one of 21 Indian gaming casinos spread across the state of New Mexico. Not far from it is the Dancing Eagle Marketplace, which shares a wall with a famous bakery called Grandma Jo’s.

Inside, you’ll find the usual bakery counter and lit display case full of eye-catching sweets. On the walls are framed photos of Elvis Presley and the bakery’s late namesake, Josephine Whitmore, who keep a watchful eye over the place.

Opening the bakery in 1998 fulfilled a lifelong dream for Grandma Jo; these days, Terese Sarracino and her sister Camille Whitmore oversee day-to-day operations. The business has grown to employ six full-time workers to produce around 100 loaves of bread a day, as well as cookies, cinnamon rolls, brownies, turnovers, and the new hot seller, cream puffs.

But the heart of the bakery is the bread. “We couldn’t go without it,” said Sarracino. “I used to say I could eat a whole loaf.” They use pizza ovens, which Sarracino later lamented as she showed me the crumbling horno next to her home. “It’s a dying art,” she said. “I’d love to get back into the tradition.”

This, finally, is the Pueblo bread I know best: elephant toes. Grandma Jo’s evenly moist loaves with a thin crust are recurring stars in my home, and my parents are always sure to pick some up on their way to visit me in Albuquerque. I too could eat an entire loaf, but I usually share it. It’s the bread that reminds me of home and of celebratory meals with my family. And it’s delicious in the way that all of the Pueblo breads are delicious — with a mild yeast flavor that demands a fierce puddle of red chile pozole, and with an added hint of pride that comes from turning the rations of a painful past into warm loaves of communal comfort.

But then, of course it’s also just bread — the simple, humble stuff of everyday sustenance. Back in Zuni, I’d asked Jimmy Paywa how he likes to enjoy a slice of his own. He said with a smile, “toasted with butter.”

His wife, Marlene, nodded and added, “with a slice of bologna.”

Andi Murphy is the creator and host of the Toasted Sister Podcast , a show about Indigenous foods. She’s also a photographer and producer for Native America Calling , a live radio show about Native American topics and issues.

Fact checked by Pearly Huang

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