400,000 torrijas a year: this is how they work in the largest pastry shop in Spain

The numbers are overwhelming. They make 400,000 torrijas throughout the year, the most consumed sweet during Holy Week, with 250,000 units sold during the season, which ends this last week of March. They use 294 tons of raw materials: 180,000 kilos of bread Brioche, 240 kilos of loaf bread, 4,400 liters of eggs, 50,000 liters of fresh milk, 15,000 kilos of sugar, 40,000 liters of oil, 200 kilos of cinnamon, 500 kilos of honey and half a ton of chocolate. These are the numbers used in the El Corte Inglés pastry shop, where around 280 people work, with more than a hundred pastry chefs on the payroll. “We are the largest non-industrial pastry shop in Spain. We have mechanical means, as in most workshops, such as temperature sources, ovens or mixers, but all our processes are natural,” Cipriano Hernández, director of the company's food products manufacturing center, explains to whet your appetite.

The sweet workshop and the central kitchen, within a 7,000 square meter facility, are located in Valdemoro (Madrid). These days, the space smells like cinnamon and honey. All hands and strength are concentrated on making torrijas. There is no stress. There is silence. Concentration is required for a job that is done by hand. Step by Step. Slice by slice. They have the process under control. They have been making the same recipe for half a century, with some modifications to adapt it to the customers' tastes. For example, they have stopped making white wine ones, because they were hardly consumed, and they have started to cover them with chocolate.

The slices of bread, Brioche or conventional loaf, they are cut by hand in traditional or bias format, soaked in warm milk infused with cinnamon sticks and sugar so that when soaked the pore of the bread opens and retains the dairy. The details are provided by the head pastry chef, responsible for the pastry division, Pablo Jericó, 56 years old, of which 35 have been spent working in the El Corte Inglés bakery. The next step: they are lightly bathed in egg and fried in two fryers with about 60 liters of high oleic sunflower oil, which is renewed every four hours. The torrija should be golden. Finally, it is coated in cinnamon and sugar and bathed in syrup, based on water, sugar and citrus. From there to the side cart, with 12 slices per grid distributed on 12 floors. Every day they produce 10,000 units that come out in different formats for the different centers they have throughout Spain, and which sell starting at 2.95 euros per unit. It is no longer a seasonal product. They sell it all year round. And it is the regions of Murcia and the Canary Islands that consume the most torrijas outside of Holy Week.

A sociological study can also be carried out around this sweet and measure the age of a neighborhood by the pastries and pastries it consumes. “Torrija is a senior product. For example, our store in Goya, in Madrid, and the one in the center of Barcelona are the ones that consume the most torrijas. And there we know that the clientele is older than in the stores where we sell more. cookies, which tend to be in the youngest neighborhoods,” says Hernández. Donuts are falling and consumption of this type of American chocolate chip cookie is increasing. Young people also prefer cheesecakes, or what they call home-style chocolate cakes – those that do not have that perfect outline as required by the canons of French pastry – or Lotus cookie cakes – an increasing trend -, the classic style. from San Marcos or Selva Negra, of which they make about 100,000 a year. They prepare about 25,000 kilos of fritters in season, especially with cream, cream and truffle filling. Those made with sweet potato and angel hair are in decline, acknowledges Jericó, who hints that there are old preparations that are going to be lost due to lack of demand. “This is the case of the bartolillos or the bones of San Expedito, a typical sweet from Madrid, similar to a fried dough donut, but shaped like a bone.” The one that remains increasingly alive, points out the pastry chef, is the roscón de Reyes: “We have gone from 250,000 to 820,000 units in a decade. There is a real rosconmania”. The next thing they are going to start making, taking advantage of the trend in Spain, are panettone. And they warn of another phenomenon: that of salty pastries. This includes the 10,000 sandwiches that, for example, they make every day, and where vegetable filling has more and more space to the detriment of ham and cheese sandwiches.

In another room of the workshop, several pastry chefs are busy covering several tres leches cakes with meringue and cinnamon, whose Genoese sponge cake has been well soaked in cream, evaporated and condensed milk. They go directly to the firm's cafeterias. The work day begins at six in the morning, when the first shift begins, at 7:30 a.m. the second batch begins, at 10 a.m. the third group arrives, and at 1 p.m. the last replacement appears. It is a vocational job, which few come to as their first option. “The kitchen engulfs the pastry chef's job. Pastry has less visibility than being a chef, and it is difficult for someone to get into pastry making first,” acknowledges Hernández. Next to him, the pastry chef nods: “I come from a cradle, because my family had a cupcake and shortbread bakery in Humanes, so I grew up surrounded by flour. Before it was a very demanding profession, where there was neither the machinery nor the technology that there is now, and it was not known when it would be released. Now everything has changed.” Here the shifts are eight hours long, with a salary starting at 22,000 gross euros per year, explains the head of the division. Luckily, they say that every year they renew the staff between 10 and 20 professionals, so the average age is lowering. Part of this new batch is Daniel Vidal, 38 years old, who arrived at the department 11 years ago, from the central kitchen, and is now in charge of production management. “I had cooking knowledge, but I discovered a more complex world with baking. It requires a lot of precision and technique to faithfully follow the recipes.”

The workshop, with the FSSC 22000 food safety certification, has an independent laboratory that controls that the raw materials they work with maintain the required quality. The person in charge of this area, Virginia Guillén, with a team of four chemists, three experts in microbiology and one person in the factory, control possible fraud, while carrying out analysis of all production so that it complies with the mandatory parameters and study the useful life of each product. “For example, we make sure that the oil they sell us is correct. Once they tried to strain rapeseed oil through sunflower. “You have to always be attentive.”

What they all agree on is that they dedicate themselves to the most beautiful job in the world: making people happy with a sweet bite.

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