Symphony of Bread, the bakery in Tiro de Línea that looks to the sky
Miguel Ángel Benítez, a baker from Alcalá, takes the breads and sweets from his town to the Tiro de Línea market.
The Tiro de Línea market has had a bakery in Alcalá de Guadaíra for the past year and a half. This name comes from the hometown of its owner and baker, Miguel Ángel Benítez, who has been in the trade for 30 years thanks to his uncles, who ran the Chari bakery in Alcalá de Guadaíra, where he began his career.
Benítez studied teaching and combined it with work in various bakeries, until his restless spirit led him to start his own business, making his own bread and pastry recipes. His passion for music, as a member of the band Baker's Road, ultimately shaped the name: Sinfonía del Pan (Symphony of Bread).
He arrived at Tiro de Línea, at stalls number 20 and 4 in the market, with the idea of creating a wide range of breads with his personal touch, although the local clientele has led him to more traditional offerings, as they seek the classic bread, but made with care. There, he puts into practice what he has learned over the years, as well as the knowledge he shared with doctoral students of one of his aunts, a Professor in the Genetics Department at the University of Seville, who frequented the bakeries where he worked. In this way, Miguel looks to the sky before baking bread to check the weather forecast and adjust his recipe accordingly, ensuring a consistently good result.
In one of the stalls, they bake daily, right in front of the customer, and in the other, across the street, they sell the finished bread. There you can find a wide variety of breads from Alcalá, which take shape after a long fermentation of the dough, between 18 and 24 hours, and are baked in a stone oven that he carefully selected and sought out. Teleras, bobas, cantos, picaítos, retorcidos, vienas (a name he prefers to "Andalusian"), molletes… fill his display cases every day. Those who know what time they come out of the oven go to get them right then. Among his most special creations is the half-kilo mollete roll, designed to be filled. On winter Saturdays, he prepares preñaos (bread filled with chorizo, morcilla, or even pringá).
In one of the bakeries where he worked, he learned to make sweets, so he brings this experience to Sinfonía del Pan. Again, he focuses more on classics, such as the Milk Buns (more information here) with or without filling, or the Cream-filled Carmelitas. They also prepare wedges, chocolate palmiers, toasted egg yolk pastries, cream with fruit, or Lotus biscuit pastries for a younger clientele. Recently, they started making their own version of the Bollycao, the Sinfocao, a sweet bread filled—very generously, Miguel points out—with chocolate from top to bottom.
Their debut with the Three Kings' Day cakes, made with the same base as the milk buns, was a resounding success. From the 20 or 30 pieces they planned to make for the holidays, they went on to produce 400 due to overwhelming customer demand. This year they will make them again, drawing on the experience gained from last year's high demand.
And also…
We'll show you how they prepare "Borrachitas" at Horno Los Suaves, a traditional sweet from Lebrija that uses bread dough as its base:
