There are dozens of great bakeries in Chicagoland, many with origins rooted in other countries.
Polish, Italian and French bakeries are in abundance, but Filipino? Not so much.
A new Filipino bakery on the Northwest Side offers both classic and contemporary treats.
If names like Putong Puti and Ube Halaya don’t easily roll off your tongue, don’t worry. The friendly staff at Umaga Bakehouse, in North Mayfair, right off the Edens Expressway, are more than happy to help guide you to something delicious. The bakery combines classic Filipino flavors – like ube, the ever-present purple yam – into some contemporary presentations, like milk bars. The idea for the bakery comes from the owners’ upbringing – both sets of parents were bakers.
“When I was in third grade, they opened a small Filipino bakery back in Lancaster, California. So from there, I had that little experience of being in a bakery,” said Kissel Fagaragan, co-owner of Umaga Bakehouse.
Appropriately, Kissel met her future husband, Robert, working at a bakery.
“We definitely wanted to keep the tradition alive. Especially bring it to Chicago,” she said.
“The Señorita Bread, the Spanish Bread – both butter-filled. One is melted and then one is like a thick, butter brown filling. Pandesal is always that go-to bread. You can eat it with anything, you can eat it by itself, you can make a sandwich out of it.”
There are colorful sapin sapin – sweets with a mochi-like texture, made from rice flour. A deep green matcha loaf is soft in texture, like their Bebinca cakes, utilizing coconut or ube. Sans rival is another classic, a meringue cake layered with buttercream and cashews. But they’ve added a few items of their own.
“Our baby was the Ensaymada. It’s like a brioche-style bun with butter and sugar on top and then we definitely had different takes on it,” she said.
It’s not all sweets. The Spanish influence in Filipino cuisine is evident in the baked empanadas, perfect handheld snacks.
“Filipinos like sweet. But we didn’t want to overdo it with the sweetness, so we kind of needed to tone it down just a teeny bit just to keep it at that happy medium,” she said.
4703 W. Foster Ave.