The Portuguese love bread… I mean really, really love bread… it’s the land of bread.
There’s bread in the morning… usually a toasted papo seco dripping with butter to accompany your coffee. For those who want a real kick, there’s sopas de cavalo cansado [tired horse soup] which is basically a bowl of corn bread topped with sugar and homemade red wine. I don’t think you’ll find this in any café, but the first time I visited Portugal, my cousin ate this for breakfast every day while I sat across the table from him with a bowl of cornflakes. We were 9 and surprisingly both turned out fine.
There’s bread in the afternoon… a bifana [pork cutlet sandwich], a prego [steak sandwich] or a tosta mista [toasted ham and cheese] on homestyle bread.
There’s bread in the evening… sitting neatly in a basket on every dinner table where it will serve multiple purposes—an appetizer with some olives and a glass of wine, a stopper to help you fill your fork, then again at the end of the meal to help clean your plate of any juices you’ve left behind.
Sleep then repeat. Bread is a ritual.
When we talk bread in Portugal [known as pão], it isn’t the sliced white stuff that sits in a rectangular bag on your counter for a week, wondering when it will make it’s way into your toaster. Most bread is made to be eaten the same day, which means a trip to the padaria [bakery] to ensure a fresh supply is on hand to satisfy the family’s daily consumption. In some rural villages, the baker’s car will make it’s way to people’s houses early each morning to drop off orders, a job once held by women who would walk from house to house with a large wicker basket balanced on their head.
So what’s the big deal? Bread is bread. That’s true, people have been baking flour, yeast and water into some sort of loaf for 14,000 years [according to archaeological finds]. Some have a little more of this and others a touch more of that to make each type unique… and it may be a small country but if you ever walk into a padaria, you’ll notice there are many, many different types to choose from.
Some personal favourites…
Papo-seco: fluffy and airy with a slightly crispy crust, this bun is a staple everywhere, and the go-to choice for sandwiches.
Broa de Milho: typically from the north region and made with a mix of corn and wheat flour, this bread is super dense with a thick, delicious crust. It works very well under a grilled sardine.
Bolo do caco: a flat-bread from the island of Madeira, made with wheat flour and sweet potato, then baked on a clay slate—slather this one in garlic butter!
I could keep going because in Portugal, bread is regional. Every district, every city, and every village has its own unique bread recipe that’s passed down through generations, which brings us to Avô Joe DaSilva and his recipe for Pão da Margarida [Margarida’s bread]. It was invented by his mother [the namesake] and grandmother [Belmira] around 1972 and has been helping feed their island for 50 years… but I’m jumping ahead.
Joe grew up in Portugal on the island of Terceira, Azores, the son of Eduardo, a baker who worked for Panificação da Ilha Terceira—a large bakery with two factories—each baking for half of the island. He would hear stories of the paradise across the Atlantic from relatives and friends that had immigrated. Canada was the land of opportunity and he was ready to relocate his family and reap the rewards of the promised land.
When Margarida became pregnant with Joe’s younger brother, the timing was right—a baby born in Canada would automatically give the DaSilvas landed immigrant status. Tickets were purchased and bags were packed, but a couple of weeks before take-off, Joe’s baby brother decided he wanted Portuguese citizenship and arrived 20 days early, throwing a wrench in the immigration plan. The family left as scheduled, with an extra little guy in tow, but visit was short-lived. Two months in, Joe’s father was homesick and not impressed with life in Canada, so they retreated back to Azores and opened a bakery of their own—Padaria Eduardo Henrique Silva.
Pão da Margarida was introduced and became an instant success. Joe worked at the bakery, studied, went on to become a music teacher and joined a band. It was this band that took young Joe back across the Atlantic to perform at one of Toronto’s Portuguese community clubs. During that visit he met Claudia. They fell in love and decided to get married making Canada his new home. The move came with a change of profession because we all know that trying to pay bills on a musician’s salary can be tough. So he picked up a brush and became Joe the Painter for six months… that was enough to jump-start his entrepreneurial spirit and he branched off with his own construction company.
Life was good for Joe. He had a wife, two boys, a big house with a swimming pool, vacations in the sun… Then in 2020, the world shut down and his life got, dare I say, better.
During the pandemic, Joe did what many people did—stayed put and made up home improvement projects to keep himself occupied. Being confined at home also made him realize that he had to drive quite far to purchase good quality Portuguese breads. The logical solution, in his eyes, was, “I’ll open a bakery close to my house and serve the neighbourhood… and next door to the bakery, I’ll open a restaurant.” Go big or go home, I guess.
The Portuguese Bake Shop and The Portuguese Chicken House opened and three years later the businesses are thriving, and part of the success may be recipes like Pão da Margarida—simple family created delicacies brought over from the family bakery in Portugal. The other part lands squarely on Joe’s shoulders—he treats everyone like family, so when we show up at his front door, we are welcomed with hug, a smile and a surprise.
“We’re not baking inside today… we’re using the wood burning oven in the backyard… and I hope everyone likes sardines, because I’m making dinner.”
While James takes photos, Joe explains the bread making process. He tells us that Pão da Margarida is, at it’s core a sourdough, which means it needs a bread starter or “sour” for short. To this day, Joe uses the traditional method from back home—a potato based mash with corn and wheat flours, water and a few other ingredients. Since the sour is a lactic acid bacteria (like in yogurt) it needs to feed, meaning adding more potato and flour every day to keep it alive! “The fermentation process takes five to seven days, luckily I have a bakery where I was able to get the sour, or else you’d have to come back next week.” [laughs]
After rolling the dough into four perfect balls, Joe leads us to his outdoor kitchen. He opens the oven to reveal the hot embers, which he neatly sweeps to make room for the loaves. “At the bakery we use normal ovens but today, you’re in for a treat. Back home, my father built a wood burning oven for his bakery that would bake 120 loaves at a time. It’s the same process we’re doing here—fire near the door, and bread at the back. That’s how you make fantastic bread!”
Twenty minutes later, the oven is ready and it’s back inside to check on the balls of dough, which have risen substantially. Joe uses his hand to chop the bread before folding it in half. This, he tells us, will give the bread a heart shape once baked and sliced. He puts the loaves in the oven, closes the door and while it bakes, he turns to the hot coals burning in the adjacent barbecue, “it’s time for the sardines. The bread will take 20 minutes, that’s enough time for us to eat.”
Minutes later, we are all sitting around the table eating grilled sardines on broa de milho and sipping on red wine. As we finish up, Joe makes his way down to the oven and pulls out the four perfectly baked loaves, bringing one to the table. “Time for dessert,” he says cutting into the bread. “And since the bread recipe is from Azores, the butter has to be from there as well—Milhafre, it tastes better,” he laughs. He slathers each piece and starts handing it out. “The Azores are small islands surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, so the cow pastures get the sea breeze and their milk tastes totally different than that of other cows. The island of São Jorge, for example, is elongated, so the cows are breathing in the Atlantic air from both sides. It’s the reason their famous cheese, Queijo São Jorge, can only be made there… the same cheese recipe somewhere else will taste different.”
We talk, eat and drink until the loaf is gone. “You think we ate a lot? Back in the old times, this whole thing would be eaten by one man for lunch,” he laughs. A man would go into the fields to work, with a gallon of wine—not a litre but a gallon—some dried meat like presunto and half a loaf of bread. That would be his meal for the day, from 5am until he got home at 5pm. Today we pick up our cellphone to order bread. The Uber Eats back in the day, was maybe a dog that was trained to deliver lunch to his owner.”
Wait, what?
“Yup. Some people had dogs that would take a basket out to the field where their master was working. Today dogs are kings and queens, but back then, they were working animals.”
Joe cuts into another loaf and keeps us entertained with stories from the Azores, until the sun starts to go down and we decide it’s time to leave. “Wait, you have to take home the other loaves.”
We’ve been here for hours… and as we walk to the door, one of Portugal’s quintessential songs comes to mind, “Uma Casa Portuguesa” by Amália Rodrigues, which translates to “A Portuguese House.” The opening stanza sums up the evening perfectly…
Numa casa portuguesa fica bem
Pão e vinho sobre a mesa
E se à porta humildemente bate alguém
Senta-se à mesa com a gente
Translation…
In a Portuguese house
Bread and wine are always on the table
And if someone humbly knocks on the door
They will sit at the table with us
Pão da Margarida
INGREDIENTS
- 800 G WHEAT FLOUR
- 600 ML WATER
- 14 G SALT
- SOUR [RECIPE BELOW]
DIRECTIONS
- In a large bowl, add the flour, salt and starter you prepared the day before.
- Mix in the water, a little at a time.
- Knead the dough for about 15 to 20 minutes.
- Let the dough rise until it has roughly doubled in size.
- Cut into balls of approximately 500g.
- Lightly flour your work surface with corn flour and roll the dough
into balls. - Allow to rest and rise for another 30-40 minutes.
- Shape your loaves by using the side of your hand to make a divot along the centre, then fold the dough in half. [This will give your sliced bread a heart shape].
- Bake at 200ºC [400ºF] for about 30 minutes or until golden brown.
- Remove loaves from the oven and allow them to rest for 20 minutes.
- Serve and enjoy.**
The sour [starter]*
INGREDIENTS
- 200 G WHEAT FLOUR
- 100 G CORN FLOUR
- 1 BOILED SWEET POTATO
- 1 BOILED POTATO
- 8 G DRY BAKER’S YEAST
- 7 G SUGAR
- WARM WATER
DIRECTIONS
- Add all the ingredients to a bowl.
- Mix with a fork until smooth; the consistency will be thick and pasty.
- Add more water to slightly thin out the texture if necessary.
- Cover and let it rest in a warm spot, about 23ºC [72ºF], for 24 hours.
CHEF’S NOTES: *PREPARE THE YEAST THE DAY BEFORE **AVÔ JOE RECOMMENDS SERVING WITH MILHAFRE BUTTER AND SÃO JORGE CHEESE… BUT YOU CAN EAT IT YOUR WAY!
WORDS: DAVID GANHÃO
RECIPE: JOE DASILVA
PHOTOS: JAMES LAI