Ring the bell for vegan pastries at Split Bakehouse

The past couple years have brought plenty of changes to Split Bakehouse. When Vanessa Corrales launched the brand in 2018 with acclaimed pastry chef Kristianna Zabala, the idea was to offer a wholesale pastry menu that was half traditional, half vegan — hence the name Split.

The bakery quickly grew from an East Village commercial kitchen into its own space, just outside the food court of La Mesa’s Grossmont Center mall. Zabala moved on to other things in 2019, yet Split continued to grow its customer base, providing both types of baked goods to coffee shops and other such food counters. Despite a colorful storefront, the bakery wasn’t open for retail.

That is, until the pandemic put a wrench in all things. To stay afloat, Split ventured into retail, first by offering home deliveries, direct to consumers. Then, in February of this year, it finally made pick-up and take-out orders available through a small service window. It will most likely look empty when you arrive, but ring a bell, and someone — likely Corrales or new pastry chef Pablo Mendez — will appear to take your order.

However, this wasn’t the only change to take place in the past year. Somewhere along the way, Split ceased to be a “split” concept bakery. Since the new year, its products have transitioned to 100 percent vegan.

Which is tough to believe when you sink your teeth into the shop’s berry pop tart. Though inspired by the famously toaster-thin breakfast treat, the Split pop tart is more of a puff pastry. The airy and flaky hand pie is filled with a strawberry raspberry jam, and glazed with a drizzle of raspberry icing. To glam it up a bit, there’s even a touch of edible gold sprayed across the top. I hope it goes without saying, this is way better than any pop tart you might get out of a box. Yes, even Toaster Strudels.

One of the trickier accomplishments of any bakery is to produce a sufficiently flaky pastry from laminated dough, and doing so usually involves a lot of butter. Which makes Split’s basic croissant something of a marvel, loaded with fine, well separated layers. The texture is mostly right on, meaning the only thing I could possible miss was the taste of butter itself. That’s less apparent in Split’s chocolate and almond croissant offerings.

And in a recent special I found: the vanilla bean “cruffin”. This tall muffin, fashioned from that croissant dough, is filled with a bourbon vanilla custard that shows a surprising creaminess for something without dairy.

However serious Split may be about vegan pastries, the cruffin exemplifies the playful side of Split Bakehouse that shows up again and again. Another weekly special offered a twist on the traditional Mexican sweet bread known as a concha, shaping its seashell-shaped crust with crumbled Oreos. Rather notoriously, Oreos are considered vegan, so the cookies motif shows up here from time to time.

Outside the pop tart, my favorite would have to be savory offering, a “jalapeño cheeze” galette. It would be tasty enough with a peppery, nondairy cream cheese wrapped into a sort of puff pastry hand pie, but it’s made inarguably better thanks to an everything bagel treatment: it’s topped with poppy seeds, sesame seeds, and dried onion and garlic. I don’t recall ordering a pastry quite like this anywhere else, but it’s definitely makes ringing that bell worthwhile.