Walk into a bakery. Have your pao newspaper-wrapped. Add your choice of filling. Or eat it just like thatReady to travel for food? You needn’t lace the sneakers. Nor pack a bag. Just mind travel 400 years ago. Step into Goa, the country’s smallest state. Think of beefy Portuguese who brought along cashew, chilli and potato. Ironically, the bread-eaters had landed in a rice bowl! Far away from home, they yearned for the crusty bread.Not only on their dinner plates but also for the Holy Communion. The devil, however, lay in the yeast – it was hard to come by. For that perfect bread, the dough had to be fermented. No yeast? The Portuguese picked the next best thing. Toddy. They added a few drops of toddy to the dough. And, well, the scrumptious Goan pao was born. Legend has it that the people of Utorda-Majorda were the first to bake bread with toddy as a fermenting medium. The art of baking bread spread in Goa and the podres (bread makers) woke up the locals with the trill of their bicycle and the aroma of freshly baked pao.As soon as the pao stepped out of the oven and onto the plate, nomenclature confusion started brewing. The British hadn’t arrived with the white bread; so there was no sliced bread. Smart alecs thought pao was quarter of a loaf, hence the name. The finicky foodies imagined that the dough was kneaded with the feet, and so the pao (in Hindi, pao is feet). But the dictionary had it straight. Pao is the Portuguese word for bread.In Madgaon (south Goa), I was looking for Pascal Gomes. The baker who makes 5,000 paos a day. Six men. A 100-year-old wood-fired mud oven. And 200 kg of white flour every day. In the maddening morning traffic, I stopped at every bend for Gomes’ address. The air was not thick with the aroma of fresh-bread; my olfactory abilities could have doubled up as a handy GPS. In a waif-thin lane, I saw a queue. Perhaps this is where Gomes makes the poiee (wheat + white flour resembling pita), katre pao (butterfly-shaped), kankon (bangles), pokshe (slit at the centre), cuniachi poiee (whole wheat flour bread) and the commonest pao (resembling dinner rolls).I was at the Gomes’ door in Comba. On a slab lay a mound of white flour dough hurriedly being rolled into fist-sized balls and stacked in iron trays (eight to a tray). On dry sacks, round poiee and butterfly-shaped katre pau were ready to be thrown into the mud oven which is pre-heated for five hours before the poiee is slid in with a long-handle flat shovel. That humid day, the oven-temperature was high; a man wearing a Kaka tee wet-mopped the floor of the oven to bring down the heat. The oven has a small opening and poiees are laid on the oven floor, two at a time. Two minutes, that is all it takes for the poiee to brown and fluff. Interestingly, there is a baking hierarchy. The poiee goes in first because it needs the most heat and bakes the fastest. Katre pao takes five minutes, round paos, eight minutes; depending on the heat, kankon might take 15-20 minutes to come out crisp and brown. Poiee is half-maida, half-whole wheat; all other pao are made of white flour.Even before the poiees were pulled out of the oven, a queue had formed outside. Old women in floral skirts were picking pao to take home; school children were getting oven-fresh poiee newspaper-wrapped for lunch. I headed home with a bag full of poiee. In the poiee-pocket, I could stuff sautéed vegetables with hung-curd mint-spread, onion rings. Or, take it to a meaty level with Goan sausages or minced meat.In Goa, set aside the apron. The rolling pin. And the dough. Walk into a bakery. Have your pao newspaper wrapped (no polythene bags here). Say a thank you to the Portuguese. And to that drop of toddy!It was the migrant Goan bakers from Saligao and Siolim who brought the pao to Mumbai. Goan bread is made in wood-fired mud ovens, locally known as ‘forn’When the Portuguese started making bread in Goa, yeast was hard to come by. They found a substitute — toddy — to ferment the bread dough