Virtual bakery Masa Madre intertwines owners’ Mexican and Jewish heritages with churro babka and challah conchas
Chicago has its fair share of Mexican panaderias and Jewish bakeries, a testament to the vibrant communities that have settled here over the years.
But one East Garfield Park bakery is embracing the confluence of these cultures with its offerings based on the most delicious aspects of both cultures’ rich food traditions.
Masa Madre is an artisanal bakery offering fresh challah, babka (a spongy sweet Eastern European bread), cookies and conchas infused with flavors from Mexican and Jewish cuisines. Items on the menu include tres leches babka, with swirls of cajeta, and vanilla conchas made with challah dough and filled with nata, or mascarpone cream.
This year, Masa Madre is once again offering a holiday box with amaranth challah, a mini churro-flavored babka loaf and honey from North Lawndale’s Hive Supply, to offer a symbolic food for a sweet new year as is traditionally done for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.
Over the weekend, co-founders Elena Vázquez Felgueres and Tamar Fasja Unikel worked through hundreds of orders to keep up with holiday demand. But their journey together as baking business owners began four years ago, before the COVID-19 pandemic forced many restaurants to rely on online orders and carefully curated drops.
From a home-based operation that took orders on Instagram, Vázquez Felgueres and Fasja Unikel have built Masa Madre out of The Hatchery in East Garfield Park, with plans to open a brick-and-mortar location next year. They want more space than the kitchen they’re currently working out of, where guests can sit down and enjoy simple foods that combine their Mexican and Jewish heritages. And they want to offer individual slices of their babka, challah and small orders of other pastries without sacrificing their efforts to be sustainable.
Local Foods in Bucktown and Ándale Market in Andersonville both keep Masa Madre pastries on shelves, and customers can pick up orders from a handful of partnering businesses across the city. They deliver in Chicago and the suburbs, and recently started shipping orders nationwide. As they’ve grown, they’ve taken their loyal following with them.
“And as much as we offer a mix of flavors, we’re also offering just a really good challah and a really good babka,” Fasja Unikel said. “So making those pastries and elevating them has been a thing that people have really resonated with.”
The bakery tries to use locally sourced ingredients when possible, Vázquez Felgueres said, such as the flour and eggs they use for their cookies. While the kitchen uses kosher ingredients, Masa Madre is not kosher certified, but they hope to provide that in the new location.
Vázquez Felgueres and Fasja Unikel are originally from Mexico City, where they met in fashion school more than a decade ago. Years later, their partners both relocated to Chicago, and they reconnected.
Fasja Unikel was a food blogger and taught cooking classes. She also had a bakery in Mexico City, “but didn’t really know how to do it here in Chicago,” she said. Vázquez Felgueres went to culinary school and worked in bakeries in Spain and Mexico City. Once she started working in Chicago, the burnout convinced her she never wanted to work in a bakery again.
“And then (Fasja Unikel) came up with this idea. And at first I was like, ‘No, it’s not what I want to do,’ ” Vázquez Felgueres said. “But then we realized that if we open our own business, we could create our own schedule, and our own workload.”
The two left their previous jobs in 2019 to focus on Masa Madre full time. Since then, the business has grown to include four more bakers, a driver and an assistant.
Both women say they were heavily influenced by their mothers’ and grandmothers’ traditions of baking together and preparing elaborate family meals.
“We’ve always leaned on them to tell us how to make something better,” Vázquez Felgueres said.
Fasja Unikel comes from a Jewish family in Mexico City and her grandmother founded the Jewish bakery Hadasa Gourmet there almost 50 years ago. “It’s always something in my mind that inspires me,” she said.
Jewish immigration to Mexico peaked from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, and communities continue to thrive in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey and Tijuana.
“They were telling their relatives to come to Mexico because it was surprisingly a very good place for them,” Fasja Unikel said. “And I think a big part was the culture and the fact that people always gather around food; the fact that family is super important in both cultures, and that food is always the way to get people together and family together.”
Initially Masa Madre was sourdough-focused, but the process became too cumbersome. Fasja Unikel perfected her babka-making skills, and the focus grew to be babka and challah, with plans to expand their offerings of Mexican pastries, including conchas.
With no shortage of holidays to base new pastry recipes off throughout the year, Fasja Unikel and Vázquez Felgueres find new ways to be creative. They’ve put their own spin on Purim hamantaschen pastries by stuffing them with Mexican candy, topped the Día de los Muertos classic treat pan de muerto with orange zest, and have filled sufganiyot with dulce de leche for Hanukkah.
Vázquez Felgueres and Fasja Unikel are using Masa Madre’s success in Chicago to advance causes they back, such as raising money for a South Side LGBTQ center and supporting Ukrainian refugees, through their baked goods. Masa Madre has also partnered with Mexican artist and human rights activist Macedonia Blas Flores, whose hand-embroidered challah coverings can be ordered on Masa Madre’s website.
“We’re more than just a bakery; we’re real people,” Vázquez Felgueres said. “And I think people can connect to that. We’re just trying to make a good product and a good company.”
Masa Madre, hellomasamadre.com
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