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The bread of Portugal: pćo, like 'pow' said holding your nose. First of all, it has nothing to do with the Portuguese-style bread one can buy in America. Somewhere over the Atlantic, sugar was added, God help it! Two large bakeries supply most of the bread for the Loulé market shops and stalls. These are invariably attended by round, pale, white-uniformed women who look solid and starchy, like the very bread they sell. However, their soft, motherly quality, like the bread, belies strength and character. The smallest, most popular rolls are crispy outside and light as a feather within. They are locally called pćposecos, pronounced 'pap'sexhs.' Northerners call them trigos, which means, simply, wheat. Most people bring their own cloth bags or recycled plastic sacks and buy a dozen or more at a time. A slightly enlarged version is called a casete and a still longer one a baguete. The regular bread comes in half-kilo, kilo, and kilo-and-a-half loaves, oval-roundish, or shaped as if the loaf were folded over, sitting on itself. The crust is thick and crunchy, and the inside is chewy and more flavorful than any so-called white bread I have ever eaten. (I always used to tear off the crust of French bread and discard the inside.) The taste is somehow connected to the earth, to the wheat in the fields. This everyday bread is called a mistura and is made from part wheat and part barley flour. Other types of bread include forma (loaf-pan shaped) versions of mistura, integral (whole wheat), and a lighter white bread which is suitable for toasting. 'Tipo Mafra' (referring to the gigantic ovens of an old monastery of that name) is made from 100% wheat and sometimes seems tastier and chewier even than the mistura, I don't know why. A recent and welcome addition is pćo de saude, literally 'health bread,' and it contains some of the bran that the bakers usually sift out and sell (in the bakeries!) for chicken feed. These rolls are smallish because they use so little yeast. A couple of shops sell broa -- a small, heavy loaf much loved in the north -- in which is added cornmeal to the wheat flour. Most flour is now milled in the towns that border on the Alentejo -- the province north of Algarve and the breadbasket of Portugal. However, Loulé has an old mill near the center of town which nowadays only grinds corn. The corn kernels lie in large baskets that are heaved up rickety wooden ladders and poured into giant funnels. The kernels tumble down these into the ancient cobwebbed grinding machines, and cornmeal pours out into huge paper or sisal sacks. I buy flour there, integral and two grades of white: hard for bread and softer for cakes. The flours are called segunda and primiera, respectively. The mill also sells barley and other grains for animals. The main Loulépćo bakery has six large wood-fired ovens, and, late in the morning, it is fun to watch local people bring the odd casserole to cook in the remaining heat, or trays of drying figs for 'toasting.' (I often go to buy pćo duro -- day-old bread-for my neighbor's dogs.) The newest bakery in Loulé (and, possibly, an ominous portent for the future) is a boutique de pćo operated by the excellent pastry shop across from the post office. Their bread is baked in electric convection ovens and has far less texture and taste than other local loaves. There is a light, amorphous quality about it, explained when we glimpsed sacks of flour there printed with the words 'Mistura Franēesa' -- French bread mixture! The stuff reminds me of the bread baked in the in-store bakeries in American supermarkets: all smell and no substance. What a sharp contrast to the truly old-style mom-and-pop bakery that I finally tracked down after several false starts, traipsing up and down innumerable side streets. No sign on the door or anywhere else, more than a hundred years old, it has only one smallish oven, and it is still difficult to fathom the secret of their outstanding bread. It is not the variety of wood, as lately the young baker, to my horror, has been burning up old duckboards, with nails protruding, from a mess in the alley outside. He says he's waiting for wood. When I ask if the type of wood makes a difference in taste, he says simply that some kinds of wood burn faster. So, is it the flour? That comes from Salir, one of those inland towns with a mill. The crust of his bread is crunchier and the inside more wheat-colored, closely textured, not really more sour but interestingly flavored. Like the other bakeries, he saves out a quantity of massa -- starter -- and uses little yeast (although he has it to sell to me, ten escudos' worth off a large fresh gray chunk). His integral loaf is small, round, and flatish, much darker than any other bread I have seen here. His forma loaves are made from the same dough as the round loaves, but rise in tins which are removed when the bread is baked. What flavor! When I asked if there was a special name for his bread, he shrugged and said, "Pćo caseiro." Caseiro means 'homemade' and is a fairly common expression. Quite a number of small shops, family-run mini mercados (mini markets), have signs in the window announcing pćo caseiro. They are supplied by small bread trucks that come from villages as far away from Loulé as 80 kilometers (almost 50 miles), over twisting hairpin mountain roads. At the edge of the Alentejo, Santa Cruz and Martin Longo are villages with just a few houses along a main road, a mini market, and a bakery. I asked the proprietress of one what was so special about her bread. She gave me one of those looks and said, "People who eat it know." With plenty of excellent bread available locally, why transport it from so far away -- especially since the price of bread is fixed in Portugal? It is because those villages are so poor (their income coming mainly from the emigrantes -- family members who work eleven months of the year abroad) that, even with the not inconsiderable cost of diesel fuel, some income from the sale of their bread is better than none at all. An extraordinary commentary on late-20th-century Portugal, about to enter the Common Market (and possibly the 20th century at the same time). Such contradictions, I suppose, are what make me like Portugal so much. And the bread, of course. (This article used with permission of: http://www.outlawcook.com) |
