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Sep 20 2015 : The Times of India (Mumbai)food trail - When in Goa, Say
Poiee!Preeti Verma LalWalk into a bakery. Have your pao newspaperwrapped. Add
your choice of filling. Or eat it just like that
Ready to travel for food? You need n't lace the sneakers. Nor pack a bag. Just
mind travel 400 years ago.Step into Goa, the country's smallest state.Think of
beefy Portuguese who brought along cashew, chilli and potato. Ironically, the
bread-eaters had landed in a rice bowl! Far away from home, they yearned for
the crusty bread.
Not only on their dinner plates but also for the Holy Communion. The devil, how
ever, lay in the yeast it was hard to come by. For that perfect bread, the
dough had to be fermented. No yeast? The Portuguese picked the next best thing.
Toddy. They added a few drops of toddy to the dough.And, well, the scrumptious
Goan pao was born. Legend has it that the people of Utorda-Majorda were the
first to bake bread with toddy as a fermenting medium. The art of baking bread
spread in Goa and the podres (bread makers) woke up the locals with the trill
of their bicycle and the aroma of freshly baked pao. As soon as the pao stepped
out of the oven and onto the plate, nomenclature confusion started brewing. The
British hadn't arrived with the white bread; so there was no sliced bread.
Smart alecs thought pao was quarter of a loaf, hence the name. The finicky
foodies imagined that the dough was kneaded with the feet, and so the pao (in
Hindi, pao is feet). But the dictionary had it straight.Pao is the Portuguese
word for bread.
In Madgaon (south Goa), I was looking for Pascal Gomes. The baker who makes
5,000 paos a day. Six men. A 100-year-old wood-fired mud oven. And 200 kg of
white flour every day. In the maddening morning traffic, I stopped at every
bend for Gomes' address. The air was not thick with the aroma of fresh-bread;
my olfactory abil ities could have doubled up as a handy GPS. In a waif thin
lane, I saw a queue.
Perhaps this is where Gomes makes the poiee (wheat + white flour resembling
pita), katre pao (butterfly-shaped), kankon (bangles), pokshe (slit at the
centre), cuniachi poiee (whole wheat flour bread) and the commonest pao
(resembling dinner rolls).
I was at the Gomes' door in Comba. On a slab lay a mound of white flour dough
hurriedly being rolled into fist-sized balls and stacked in iron trays (eight
to a tray). On dry sacks, round poiee and butter fly-shaped katre pau were
ready to be thrown into the mud oven which is preheated for five hours before
the poiee is slid in with a long-handle flat shovel. That humid day, the
oven-temperature was high; a man wearing a Kaka tee wet-mopped the floor of the
oven to bring down the heat.The oven has a small opening and poiees are laid on
the oven floor, two at a time.Two minutes, that is all it takes for the poiee
to brown and fluff. Interestingly, there is a baking hierarchy. The poiee goes
in first because it needs the most heat and bakes the fastest. Katre pao takes
five minutes, round paos, eight minutes; depending on the heat, kankon might
take 15-20 minutes to come out crisp and brown. Poiee is halfmaida, half-whole
wheat; all other pao are made of white flour.
Even before the poiees were pulled out of the oven, a queue had formed outside.
Old women in floral skirts were pick ing pao to take home; school children were
getting oven fresh poiee newspaper wrapped for lunch. I headed home with a bag
full of poiee. In the poiee-pocket, I could stuff sautéed vegetables with
hung-curd mint spread, onion rings. Or, take it to a meaty level with Goan
sausages or minced meat.
In Goa, set aside the apron. The rolling pin. And the dough. Walk into a
bakery.Have your pao newspaper wrapped (no polythene bags here). Say a thank
you to the Portuguese. And to that drop of toddy!
