A mallorca is a Puerto Rican pan dulce, made with enriched yeast dough and rolled into a snail shape. The bread is only slightly sweet with a soft, delicate texture. It has a slightly buttery edge, like a croissant, but to mainland Americans looks like a cinnamon roll.
“When I shared a picture with a friend and they said it looks like a cinnamon roll, my heart just sank. That’s when I thought, it’s never getting cinnamon,” said Skye Luna Mulero Zonoozi.
“I want people to find these things and celebrate them for what they are,” Skye said.
Skye is the baker behind Moonfire Kitchen, a new home bakery whose menu specializes in their family’s Puerto Rican food, and the Persian techniques and flavors they learned from in-laws.
Skye Luna Mulero Zonoozi is the baker and chef behind Moonfire Kitchen.
“I’m trying to connect to my identity, and have people see that as well and be able to connect with that,” Skye said.
“It’s so tricky to balance that. If I put cinnamon in this, I think people would jump on it,” they said. “But I’m trying to be authentic to these items, I want these items to be the best that they can be.”
For Skye, part of the inspiration behind Moonfire Kitchen is to give themselves license to explore their heritage cuisine.
“I grew up making a lot of savory Puerto Rican dishes but not sweet ones,” Skye said.
“I grew up in a really poor household because my mom was a Hispanic woman [working multiple jobs] and my dad is disabled,” Skye said. “From a very early age, it was a helpful thing to do for our family to learn how to cook and be able to assist in that way.”
Out of necessity, a love for cooking grew.
While Skye’s mom was the better cook, their dad is who inspired experimentation in the kitchen. He would be able to take whatever they had left and turn it into a meal.
“‘Chopped’ was like an obsession — that’s what I felt like my dad did,” Skye said of the Food Network show.
Skye now lives across the country from family, who are still in Florida. Skye came to Arizona to get a degree in gospel arts at Grand Canyon University.
“I ended up really not liking it,” Skye said. “When I was there, I discovered that I was queer and nonbinary and thought, ‘This is not going to work.’”
Skye got a full-time job to start paying off student loans, and soon met their partner, Andrew Zonoozi. When he got into a master’s program at the University of Arizona a few years after he proposed, the couple relocated to Tucson.
Because Skye was born in Florida, they have a slightly different relationship to Puerto Rico than those who still live on the island territory.
“It’s nice having family members tell me things, to look into cultural standards. What can you expect when you walk into a bakery, what will you see? When I first saw [the mallorca] I was like, I need to make this, this looks amazing,” they said.
Moonfire Kitchen makes garlic chive flatbread ($6) to dip in their Persian-style hummus. Each order comes four to a package and is best served heated up in a pan.
While you’ll be able to sample Moonfire Kitchen’s plain mallorca at upcoming events — Skye does want to experiment with adding different flavors to the bread. A sweet variation might come with orange zest, but Skye also might make savory rolls, topped with butter instead of powdered sugar and used for sandwiches.
Moonfire Kitchen will be featured at the Nosh Market on Saturday, April 1. Savory items like garlic chive flatbreads and cilantro jalapeño hummus will be available at both events, along with sweet items like chocolate cake with brown butter sea salt icing in the shape of stars and moons. (Skye loves space and astrology, and you’ll catch the galactic influence in the holographic stickers they designed and use in every order.)
Skye was introduced to hummus through their partner, Andrew. His family is Persian, and he converted Skye into a hummus fan.
“For the longest time, I thought I didn’t like hummus because it was store-bought hummus,” Skye said. Andrew would take Skye to restaurants and ask them to try the hummus, and eventually Skye conceded. They’ve loved hummus ever since.
“I wanted to be able to do something that is a mix of my ethnicity, the culture that I’ve been brought into with his family and have the privilege of learning different things that I’d never have known otherwise,” Skye said.
Persian flavors enter the menu elsewhere, too, like with a saffron potato bisque you can regularly order online for weekend delivery. “I can make the tahdig for saffron basmati rice. I’ve come to appreciate saffron, turmeric,” they said.
While at-home baking restrictions prevent Skye from preparing classic Puerto Rican dishes like arroz con gandules or arroz con pollo, they’re trying to find a way to incorporate boricua flavors into the menu elsewhere.
“The base of those is sofrito, the Puerto Rican cooking base. I want to try out a sofrito hummus, with some of the seasoning that are very popular in Puerto Rican food, adobo, sazon, and fuse together,” Skye said.
“What’s ironic is that I hate when restaurants do that. If I come to this place for Mexican food, I want Mexican food, not Mexican-Chinese food. But there are places where food can overlap and celebrate each other. Sofrito is so flavorful and fresh. And something like garbanzo beans, or a white bean, that allows that flavor to mix into it in a nice way, you’re not squashing it, you’re marrying the ingredients,” Skye said.
“I’ve essentially been trying to blend all these different parts of myself into this project. It’s kind of a big melting pot, but it’s authentic because it’s me.”
Moonfire Kitchen
Location: Nosh Market from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday, April 1 at 4695 N. Oracle Road; and St. Philip's Plaza Market on weekends after the Nosh Market.
How to order: You can place orders online by Wednesday at midnight for weekend pick-up or delivery.
For more information about Moonfire Kitchen, check out their Instagram and website.
Note: Moonfire Kitchen is a new cottage bakery and has only been open for a few weeks as of writing. Menu changes might be made in the future.
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