Poee

A poee goes onto the floor of a wood-fired oven as a flattened disc of dough and comes out in under a minute as a puffed, hollow round. That speed is why bakers fire poee first in the morning, while the oven is at its hottest, and move to the softer pão of the same dough once the heat drops. Steam has nowhere to go inside the disc, so it lifts the top skin from the bottom and leaves a pocket that opens along one edge with a thumb. The skin comes out thin, speckled brown, and faintly leathery, and the round breathes out a hot, yeasty steam the moment it is torn.

The dough is wheat in two registers: refined flour and whole-wheat flour with its husk, which gives the crumb a chew and a grainy, nutty edge that white pão lacks. Traditionally the rise came from palm toddy, left to ferment the dough for about two days, and that long ferment leaves a faint sour-sweet smell in a fresh round. A slack dough or a cooling oven produces a flat, dense disc with no pocket at all. Ash on the oven floor sticks to the underside of the bread, so bakers let the wood burn down to coal before the dough goes in.

The oven is a domed brick or stone chamber fed with split wood, and one Majorda bakery has been described with terracotta tiles laid as the baking floor. The baker slides the discs in and takes them out almost at once, so the work is a rhythm of heat on the forearms and quick hands, with the fire managed to hold its peak for the poee before the pans of softer pão go in. A shop at sunrise smells of woodsmoke and baking wheat, and the first rounds leave while the crust is still crackling faintly as it cools.

Split along its edge, a hot poee holds fried chouriço, the red, vinegar-sharp Goan pork sausage, with the fat running into the crumb and the chilli heat arriving after the chew. It takes a fried egg or a spoonful of onion and tomato just as readily. The same round, torn instead of split, mops up xacuti and other coconut gravies, its husked crumb holding together where a softer roll collapses. Within a day the pocket loses its spring and the crust toughens, which is why the best poee is eaten the morning it is baked, still warm enough to fog the paper bag.

The poder makes this bread, and the word comes from the Portuguese padeiro, baker. Poders have delivered by bicycle, and households once set their mornings by the call. The All Goa Bakers Association has put the number of registered bakers at around 300, with unofficial counts higher, and a bakers' festival, the Poderachem Fest, is held at Succour in North Goa. Toddy is hard to source now that few tappers remain, so many bakeries, South Goa especially, use commercial yeast. Vogue India reported in 2018 that poee was finding fans outside Goa.

Wheat on a rice coast

Portugal held Goa from 1510 until 1961, and leavened wheat bread and the poder who bakes it entered the local kitchen during that long occupation, alongside the Church.

Accounts of exactly when the craft spread differ. One widely repeated version says Jesuits in Salcete, one of the "old conquests", taught baking to newly converted Christians from the 1550s. Another reference dates bread's arrival to the early seventeenth century. No record names the first poder or the first bakery.

The Salcete account ties the bread to a specific supply line. The Chardo caste of Majorda, in Salcete, is credited with tapping the palm toddy that raised the dough, so the first poee rose on the sap of the same subdistrict's coconut groves.