Bread talk: Goa’s traditional poi faces new challenges
PANAJI: It’s three in the morning and eerily quiet in the village of Socorro not far from Goa’s capital, Panaji. And, while the world sleeps, inside a stuffy, shuttered room, Nitish Kumar Sha clanks the metal peel against the sides of a wood-fired oven scooping out freshly baked poi (or poee) — a uniquely Goan leavened whole wheat bread dusted with rice bran from the oven into a waiting wicker basket.
It is the final lot of a shift that began at 7pm the previous evening when he and a group of workers first began kneading the dough, adding water, yeast, sugar and ghee to make a bread unique to Goa.
Sha came to Goa 10 years ago as a young person looking for a job and was only able to find work in a bakery. The hours were long and the work involved spending the better part of his day in the dimly lit and smoke-filled bakery.
“I have come to quite like the work, which is why I have stuck around for 10 years now,” Sha said.
Sha is one among thousands of workers from across the country, mainly from Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha and Karnataka that now form the backbone of Goa’s baking industry, once the exclusive domain of a set of families from the villages of Salcete, a Catholic dominated tehsil in South Goa, that were the original recipients of the know-how of the unique bread making from the Portuguese.
“Today more than 75% of traditional bakers in Salcete have either handed over their business for somebody else to run, or have shut it down entirely,” said Agapito Menezes, the president of the All-goa Association of Bakers (AGAB).
It isn’t just that — demand for the traditional bread has ebbed; its baking is labour-intensive at a time when workers are hard to come by; and inflation has increased costs. Worse, a recent state government law requiring the shift to electric ovens from wood (and coconut husk) fired ones could raise costs even more, fear bakers.
And there’s a larger question that worries people such as Menezes — is Goan bread truly Goan bread if nongoans are making it? Menezes points out that more than 75% of the traditional bakeries are now run by people from outside the state.
“Goan bread is changing and not for the better…,” he laments.
Baking history
The art of baking leavened bread first arrived on the subcontinent with the Portuguese.
“The Portuguese who arrived here really didn’t take to the locally available rice and gram chapatis and they — especially the soldiers — longed for the bread they ate back home. So, they taught a few local Catholic families from the village of
Majorda the craft, from where those families took it to the rest of Goa,” said Radharao Gracias, a lawyer and culture chronicler.
“It was in Majorda, at the home of Paixão Gomes where he and others were taught to bake bread. Even today the house stands and is referred to as Paixão podeir’s (podeir, being the Konkani corruption of the Portuguese word padeiro, meaning baker) house. They taught it exclusively to the families of Chaddos (erstwhile Kshatriyas and Vani who converted to Christianity),” he added.
They made the pao, of course, which spread across the region, and is now popular across India, but the truly unique Goan bread was the poi.
The pao and the poi quickly became a central part of the Goan Catholic diet — freshly baked bread delivered to the doorstep just in time for breakfast. It was the perfect accompaniment to drown the previous days’ leftover coconut curry. The whole wheat poi, not unlike the Middle Eastern Pita, with an air pocket at the centre was the obvious choice for those who did not like the pao, which uses Maida.
In Goa, bread was traditionally baked using toddy (sap of the coconut flower) to leaven the bread, a feature unique to locally made bread, although this has since given way to commercial yeast.
No Goan meal was complete without the bread, which, in Catholic households is usually eaten soaked in a broth of stewed lentils or spicy meat dishes. It was soon adopted by other communities as well cutting across religious lines in Goa.
The word “pao”, the Portuguese word for bread, soon became synonymous with Goa and Goans and an important cultural marker. In places such as Bombay where it would be used to refer to a simple-headed lad especially a Catholic — not surprising since it was those of the baking trade who were among the first to migrate from Goa — and even reached the royal households of the princely rulers of Rajasthan.
Neither the pao nor the poi can be found in Portugal, though.
“People say the Portuguese brought the bread to Goa, but if you go to Portugal, you will not find this bread there. This is truly our own,” said Bond Braganza, the general secretary of the All-goa Association of Bakers (AGAB).
The challenges
A baker’s life is hard. Lawrence Rodrigues, who continues to run the family bakery at Vaddem village — starts his day at 5.30 in the morning having had less than three hours’ sleep the previous night. The bread he finished baking at 3am needs to be sold door-to-door and he needs to allocate the bread to the delivery boys and supply to his wholesale buyers — a process that ends only around 8.30am.
By 10am, he needs to begin kneading the next round of
flour for bread that will be sold in the evening.
The process of kneading, waiting three hours for the dough to rise, making the buns and baking them will go on until 3pm after which, the second round of delivery begins. By 8pm in the evening, the second round of baking starts.
“It is hard work and in an era of diminishing returns, no one wants to do it anymore. Nearly all the traditional bakers have given up,” said Rodrigues, who is among the few surviving bakers whose family has been doing the work for generations.
“It is back-breaking work — something that the younger generation is unwilling to do. Our forefathers did this, not to make money and buy themselves a big car, but to feed the family,” Braganza added.
And there are other challenges ges as well. “Our biggest threat is the shortage of labour,” said Rodrigues, who continues to run the family bakery at Vaddem village. “Prior to the pandemic I was producing more than 6,000 loaves, now it is just around 1,500. The cost of raw material has shot up — a sack (50kgs) of maida that used to cost ₹1,300 a few months ago is now nearly 2,000. Firewood that was around 12,000 is now 24,000 per truckload, but we cannot increase the price of the bread — people will go hungry if we do,” Rodrigues said. The Goa State Pollution Control Board’s order asking bakers to shutter their wood fired ovens and switch to electric ovens hasn’t helped. “Poi is impossible to bake in an electric oven,” Braganza claimed, adding that the body is negotiating with pollution board on not to enforce the order. Braganza’s claim is perhaps prompted more by the economic impact of the shift to electricity — professional bakers HT spoke to said the poi can be baked in electric ovens with no difficulty. And running through these complaints is a common thread, of the irreversible change in a way of life, of the pain of locals upset at what they see as a takeover of their homes and lives and businesses by people from other parts of the country. In this case, the takeover of the craft — whose know-how was once an exclusive preserve Goans outside the traditional families, then to immigrants initially from the neighbouring states of Karnataka and Maharashtra, but later to tribal Christians from the states of Bihar, Jharkhand and Odisha. Menezes added that the temptation to lease bakeries to someone else to run is also too strong to resist since margins are low. Sonia Filinto, a filmmaker who chronicled the challenges facing the industry in her recently released film Bread and Belonging, said the change in traditional occupations is happening everywhere. “The cooks in Calicut who are today cooking the very, very traditional food are not from Kerala (anymore). If you go to Rome, all the pizza makers there are all Bangladeshis. Same is for Goa’s traditional multigenerational bakers. Predominantly bread is made now by non multi generation al bakers, who come from outside the state, to fill the void. Everyone wants a better life, everyone wants to improve their lives,” she added. In a bid to resurrect the business, AGAB has now applied for a Geographical Indicator (GI) tag for Goa’s traditional breads, the Goan pao and the poi. The hope is that this will encourage those traditional bakers, who have been in business, to keep going.
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