Loba Pastry's black mole croissants blend classic recipes with Mexican flavors

Valeria Socorro Velazquez Lindsten spent a lot of time learning about food from the women in her family back home in the Mexican city of Guadalajara.

Socorro, owner of Loba Pastry at 3600 N. Lincoln Ave., said her upbringing taught her the importance of using high-quality, seasonal ingredients in her cooking. As a result, many of the menu items at Loba are only available during certain times of the year, including their black mole croissants.

In the fall and winter, Loba's black mole or mole negro croissants, are made with a mole paste made up of at least a dozen ingredients including black sesame seeds, black cocoa powder, star anise, bananas and roasted chili peppers. A decadent piece of dark chocolate awaits at the pastry's center. Making the croissants is a week-long process, so they're only available on Sundays and Mondays.

In addition, Loba sells red mole croissants for the holiday season and in the spring and summer, they make green mole versions of the pastry with fancy white chocolate.

Socorro trained in the style of classic French pastries, so Loba fuses those techniques with Mexican flavors.

But customers won't find basic cookies or brownies at Loba Pastry.

"I don't make any of the traditional stuff. It is just adjacent to traditionality, and the mole croissant fits right into it," she said. "As much as it is the standard, I always wanted to put my own feelings into it, and that is from growing up Mexican."

Socorro admits that as a kid, she did not enjoy mole at all. The combination of a savory, normally chocolate-based sauce served with chicken, didn't sound appetizing to her. But watching the maternal figures in her family toil over their meals helped her appreciate the art of making food, turning her into a self-proclaimed "food nerd."

"I was very lucky to grow up the way that I did. My grandmother had not a farm, but she lived in a small town, and it was very commonplace to have vegetables straight from the fields. ... Everything was very much from the earth," she said.

When she was 16, Socorro moved to Chicago from Mexico and began working in fine dining. She eventually moved on to pastry school where she learned all the techniques she uses in her shop daily.

Loba opened in January 2016, just two blocks down the street from their current Roscoe Village bakery, which they moved into in 2023.

The bakery also sells items like sourdough muffins, loaves of bread including challah and rogbrød (Danish rye bread), and seasonal lattes such as their signature wolf latte, a warm, deeply-spiced drink with vanilla bean and Mexican cinnamon. One truly eclectic drink on their menu is inspired by marranitos, the pig-shaped molasses and ginger cookies found in the cases at traditional Mexican bakeries or panaderías.

"I try to drive the point that it's not about, you know, like a dish is going to be Mexican if a Mexican person makes it, that's it. ... Part of the reason why Mexican food tastes a little bit different in the U.S. is because we're using American ingredients ... not that food in Mexico is more authentic because people are more Mexican. It doesn't work that way. It's just the quality of the ingredients, the availability and the seasonality," she said.

Stories of her great-grandmother's chickens and fruit orchard permeate her memory, alongside the legends she grew up hearing about the once-endangered Mexican gray wolves born in the Southwestern United States and Northern Mexico. The idea for her bakery's name came after hearing a report on the Snap Judgement podcast about the beloved “06 Female,” a six-year-old wolf hunted and killed in 2012 just outside of a protected area in Yellowstone National Park. In her short life, 06 faced lone battles against rival wolf packs and raised 13 pups with a 100% survival rate, a rare feat for wildlife. Her story inspired updated conservation policies and further protections for other animals. It also inspired Socorro, who went on to use "loba," the Spanish word for female wolf, for her bakery's name.

"The part of this story that resonated with me is that there is a female leader of the pack changing the way wolf behavior would come to be for the future generations," Socorro said. "I don't think I realized that at the beginning ... but almost 10 years later, that's sort of become the mission of the shop."

Loba Pastry, 3600 N. Lincoln Ave. The black mole croissant is $6. Visit lobopastry.com.