Medialunas in Buenos Aires: what they are, how to order, what to avoid

Overview

A medialuna is a small crescent pastry, glazed and faintly sweet, and the first thing to know is that it is not a croissant, however much it looks like one from across a café. It is smaller, denser and less flaky, with a tight, tender crumb rather than an airy, shattering one, and — in its most common form — a sticky sugar-syrup glaze brushed on before or after baking that a croissant never has. Where a croissant is about butter and lift, the medialuna is about that sweet, slightly chewy compactness. Judging one by the standard of the other is the commonest disappointment, and it is the wrong standard.

It belongs to Argentina at large rather than to this city in particular — it is the national breakfast, eaten from one end of the country to the other and across the water in Uruguay too. What Buenos Aires gives it is the setting: a café culture serious enough that the morning pairing of coffee and medialunas is closer to an institution than a habit, and a bakery on more or less every block turning out fresh batches.

The medialuna is one member of a larger family called facturas — the general word for the sweet baked goods a bakery sells by weight or by the dozen. There is a much-repeated story that the odd, irreverent names of some facturas (little cannons, friar’s balls and the like) were coined by immigrant bakers, many of them anarchists, mocking the church, the army and the police around the turn of the twentieth century. It is a good story and it captures something true about who staffed the bakeries; how much of the naming is documented and how much is folklore is genuinely uncertain, so enjoy it as the former sort of history. The medialuna’s own name is simply the shape: “half moon”.

What to order

The one real decision is which of the two kinds you want, and they are genuinely different pastries:

• medialuna de manteca — made with butter, sweeter, softer, glossier, and finished with the sugar-syrup glaze. This is the one most people mean, the default of the café breakfast, and the one that goes with coffee.
• medialuna de grasa — made with lard rather than butter. It is smaller, drier, crisper, less sweet and faintly savoury, and it is the older, plainer style. It stands up better to a slice of ham and cheese and is less of a dessert.

If you say nothing you will usually get de manteca; if you want the savoury, crisper one, de grasa is the words to use. Neither is more correct — they are two different pleasures, and a good bakery makes both well.

They are bought by number, not individually: a docena is a dozen, a media docena a half. A single one with a coffee is a perfectly normal café order, but taking a paper bag of a dozen home is the more local move. Worth knowing, too:

• caliente or tostada — warmed or lightly toasted, which many places will do and which transforms a good one.
• rellena — filled, most often with dulce de leche, sometimes ham and cheese in the de grasa style. The plain version is the classic; the filled one is a small indulgence.

What to avoid

The enemy of a medialuna is time, not fraud. These are pastries that are wonderful fresh and dispiriting stale, and the whole skill of buying them well is reading freshness.

A stale medialuna is dry, hard at the tips and dull rather than glossy on top; the glaze that should be faintly tacky has gone to a matte crust. A fresh one is soft, springs back a little, and the de manteca still gleams. A bakery selling from a fully stocked case at an odd hour, with everything looking identical and slightly tired, is selling yesterday’s batch — the good places sell out and refill, so a half-empty case in the late morning is often the better sign than a full one.

Beware, too, the café that serves an oversized, obviously bought-in “croissant” and calls it a medialuna. The genuine article is small — two or three bites — and a large, flaky, pale crescent with no glaze is a different pastry wearing the name, usually from an industrial supplier rather than an oven on the premises. And the shrink-wrapped medialunas from a kiosk or supermarket shelf are a convenience food, not the thing itself; they are always a letdown against one from a bakery that morning.

Practicalities

Medialunas are among the cheapest pleasures in the city — a dozen from a neighbourhood bakery costs a couple of dollars’ worth, and a single one with a coffee barely registers. Argentina’s inflation makes any peso figure meaningless in a season, so treat them as pocket change and be suspicious only of a café charging a sit-down premium for a pastry that costs almost nothing over the bakery counter a few doors away.

The rhythm is what is worth knowing. Bakeries bake in batches, and the two that matter are the early morning and the late afternoon — the second timed for the merienda, the afternoon coffee-and-pastry break that is a real fixture of the day here, roughly between five and seven. Arriving as a fresh tray comes out is the difference between the pastry at its best and one that has sat a couple of hours. If you want them warm to eat on the spot, a bakery with its own oven is far likelier to oblige than a café buying them in.

Buying is over the counter, by the dozen, and at the smaller neighbourhood bakeries cash is still the norm — carry small notes, as the city guide advises. A dozen keeps for the day but is a shadow of itself by the next; these are made to be eaten the morning or afternoon they are baked, not stored.