ANISHA FRANCIS
anisha@herald-goa.com
MAJORDA: At 78, Joao Godinho is a sprightly old-timer who walks with a spring in his step. His small bakery in the tinto along the railway track in Majorda is exhaustingly hot – the large rustic oven in the back room stays hot for hours after baking – but Joao does not seem to mind. “I have a fan, but I can’t use it here. Wouldn’t want the bread to dry out,” shrugs the seasoned baker, hardly breaking a sweat in his stifling but shiny-clean work quarters.
Joao has not always been a baker – just during his childhood and now, again, in his retirement. His father, Joaquim Godinho founded and ran Godinho bakery all his life and taught his son the secrets of authentic Goan bread – wheat bran for that satisfying bite and toddy for fermentation - the heady coconut aroma that wafts out of the warm pao is just a bonus. “I started baking with my father when I was 12 or 13 years old. We used to knead the dough by hand and made double the quantity I make now,” he reminisces. “When I completed my education, I joined government service, with the Department of Health Services,” says Joao, who retired way back in 2005, after 35 years on the job.
“I sat at home for a few years, but then I realised I needed a purpose. In 2012, I decided to come see the old bakery, which had fallen to ruins, unused since my father passed,” he says. The roof had given way, and the bakery had a tree growing through it, he says. “The brick oven had also collapsed and lay in pieces. I spent most of my savings and gratuity on rebuilding the space and doing up the oven again. I also bought a stand-mixer to speed up the kneading process,” Joao recalls. With just one assistant to help him, Joao bakes several types of bread – pao, poee – both soft and crunchy variants – but the most popular offering is the bol – somehow soft and dense at the same time, his coconut bread is a revelation. “I add plenty of coconut, some sugar and just a touch of cardamom. The toddy does the rest of the work,” he says proudly as he doles out parcels of bread to the constant spree of customers who stop by his shop every evening.
The brown bol is sold three to a bag, and as delicious with a spicy curry as it is as a teatime snack.
“I bake them only on Mondays and Fridays but end up baking more often this season as I’m flooded with orders from wedding houses, which always serve bol, as a tradition,” he says.
Joao is one of the very few Goan bakers who still uses toddy to proof his bread. “The toddy stays good in the fridge for around three days. It is expensive and often difficult to source, but this is our way of making bread,” he says, adding that he sometimes gets toddy all the way from Sanguem. “I add a tiny amount of yeast as well, to help the fermentation along,” he says.
The other thing that sets Joao apart from other bakeries is that he does not deliver his bread. “All my business is conducted at the shop, I don’t bake very large batches and I’m content with what I sell here, to my regulars,” says Joao, adding that he wouldn’t be able to hire a Goan poder to go door-to-door even if he wanted to deliver.
Rebuilding his father’s old bakery was more of a passion project for the pensioner, whose son is settled in the UK. The baking process starts with kneading the dough at 10 am, and the bakery gets fired with wood around 2 pm. Throughout the day, Joao toils in the heat, shaping the dough balls, checking on them in the oven, supervising the assistant and staying constantly on the move, purely because he wants to, not because he needs to. Does he even turn a profit? “Yes, sometimes. It’s a good business if you scale up and do commercial quantities. For me though, this is enough,” he laughs. After him, he does not expect his son to run the bakery. “We sell our bread at rates fixed many years ago, when flour and labour was much, much cheaper. My son has a family to support, he won’t be able to do that with such a small operation. Who knows, perhaps he will take it up in his retirement,” he laughs.