Brun is pao (bread) with a hard crust. Coax any seasoned hands in an old Mumbai bakery (Yazdani especially) and this is what you are likely to hear: Brun, a popular breakfast version of the famous pao, is what you get after baking the pao, or gutli, as they call it colloquially, twice – or till it gets its signature café au lait-coloured crust.

All true, but that’s until you take the first bite of a freshly baked Brun with maska – dunked in tea or without – and suddenly the wonderment of this Silk Route gift strikes you. What is simply explained as vanilla hard (kadak) crust pao is actually a masterpiece that is high on both baking technique and dough-making skills.

Unlike the pao, the credit for which goes to the Portuguese, Brun is an interesting amalgamation of the baking principles of not only our (part) colonial rulers, who got us the art of fermenting with toddy, but also the Iranis, who were known to be the master bakers of the port stations of Uzbekistan and Samarkand. It is this ingenuity that is on display in the three layers of the Brun – the brittle top layer, the beehive-like airy second layer and the soft, chewy third that can soak in any curry like the pao.

In fact, the mark of a good Brun is its brittle top, which shatters if sliced by an amateur hand. It is this foreplay of textures and taste that makes Brun not only the ideal accomplice to tea but to quite a few stews and Goan/Kokan curries.

So where did Brun originate, and what is its fascinating story? One theory says that the Brun was inspired by the British Wigg, a similar-sized bun made with sweetened dough, herbs and spice. That could have been correct if Portuguese hadn’t landed in India – and made Bandra one of their settlements along with Goa – much before the Queen’s men.

The other more widely acceptable theory is its relation with poee, one of India’s first leavened bread. The story goes that when Portuguese traders decided to settle in India – for purpose of trade and otherwise – one of their major concerns was the bread. Back in the late 1400s, India was a nation of chapattis and naans – neither of which appealed to their palate. The Goan sannas, made using fermented batter, toddy, salt and water, and fluffy just as a bread back home, came close but didn’t make the cut. Where it did was with the technique, which was used to create the first bread like flatbread. This could explain why the traditional recipe of pao calls for toddy instead of yeast for fermentation. The idea behind using toddy was not only to make the dough rise and the pao fluffy and sponge-like, it was also for the sponge texture and the sweet or sour taste that made it a perfect pair with most Goan curries, like Vindaloo.