Rise and shine: Where to find the best breads in Mumbai, with Kunal Vijayakar

Bakeries still make me light-headed. From brun pav to baguettes, I love them all. Here are some of my favourites, old and new.

Bread can make me weak-kneed and unstable. The smell of good bread baking can make me irrational, romantic and lose control. And a great warm, crusty, honest white loaf, like a freshly baked baguette, with just a bit of salted butter drives me hysterical, just makes me fall apart.

I recently discovered a gem at Breach Candy, Mer Konfekt. They make vegetarian breads without any maida. Seen here is their Jowar Shingoda Baguette.

There’s something in warm bread that is evocative, comforting and maternal. Maybe that’s because I come from a family of bread lovers. While any normal Indian family would have rotis or rice at the table, we always had bread. Breakfast was never kanda-poha, upma, parathas, idlis, thalippeth or poli-bhaaji, it was always toast and butter. With fried eggs, my mother would shallow-fry slices of bread in ghee till golden brown. With a bit of milk and eggs, we’d have French toast; sometimes sweetened, but most often savoury. Creamy scrambled eggs would be dished out with crusty brun pav, and akuri with freshly baked laadi pav. At mealtimes, mutton was always eaten with pav, and I’ve gone to the extent of using slices of bread to mop up my prawn curry, instead of the staple steamed rice.

Even when eating out, like at one of those old-fashioned continental meals either at The Chambers at the Taj, The Ambassador Hotel, The Willingdon Club or when abroad, the breadbasket with breadsticks and little hard or dinner rolls with frozen curls of butter, for me, is the most blessed way to start a meal. Bread is my go-to meal; even my favourite dessert is a well-made bread and butter pudding.

Bakeries still make me light-headed. The smell of fresh bread and the sight of a loaf. My earliest memory of a bakery is of A Palmer and Co at Kemps Corner. It stood in the compound of what is now Om Chambers, which houses China Garden, right next to the Parsi Doongerwadi.

Alongside A Palmer and Co was the Italian bakery and confectionery, L Pierotti. Together they made pastries, biscuits, all our birthday cakes, long crusty baguettes and many batches of hot bread. The whole of Kemps Corner smelt of sweet confectionary and bread. I’m sure that’s when the kilos started creeping up on this then-eight-year-old.

A freshly baked focaccia at Foodhall. At outlets across the city, breads emerge on a timetable that is posted on a wall right next to the oven.

As kids, a trip to the suburbs always meant that the drive back was timed to catch a freshly baked batch of pav coming off the wood-fired ovens at City Bakery, Worli. Long before Mumbai became so polluted and crowded, you could smell bread coming out of the ovens at City Bakery a mile away. We would jump out of the car and buy hot, crusty brun. Not to take home but to polish off immediately in the car, after stopping at a nearby store to buy butter to pat on.

But the real pav-wala was that man on a cycle with a long beard, in skullcap and checkered lungi. The cycle always had a big wooden box mounted on the back, covered with black plastic and held in place by a rubber tube. This wooden box contained hot bread. This was the typical Mumbai pav-walla. He picked up fresh bread from the local bakery and dropped it off at his regulars’ homes in the neighbourhood, twice a day. Even today you can see this lungi-clad cyclist selling bread in most parts of south Mumbai, including Malabar Hill, Warden Road and Nana Chowk. To add to his income he’d also sell sweet toast, sweet buns, khari biscuit and eggs.

Bread making in those days was dominated by the Iranis. Bastani, Kayani, Sassanian, Paris and Yezdani tiled six pieces of dough together and baked ‘the laadi’. A soft white inside with a crisp brown outside gained the bastardisation ‘brun’. Till today, the bread that comes out of the ovens of Yezdani Bakery at Cawasji Patel Road in Fort creates a rush; and their afternoon batch of apple pies finds office-goers queuing in the narrow lane where it stands.

The multi-grain sourdough at The Baker’s Dozen. They also do brioche, bagels, baguettes, pain aux cereales, cinnamon rolls, croissants, a ragi bread and masala pav.

While the Irani bakeries still do brisk business, today’s bread has turned artisanal and the interest in bread is hot. The Bombay Baking Company (BBC) at the JW Marriott in Juhu was, for a very long time, my favourite place to pick up a huge loaf of pain au levain (sourdough) or ciabatta. As you enter the BBC, the rack on the right is always loaded with freshly baked breads; the sourdough is lovely, crusty and dense.

Indigo Deli in Colaba was an obligatory pit stop before taking a boat from Gateway to Alibaug. At the far end of the deli, the bread section always held small baguettes, freshly herbed focaccia, hard multi-grains and whole-wheat.

All Foodhalls offer a huge variety of artisanal home-made breads. At first glance they don’t look tempting at all, because they’re wrapped in cling film or plastic bags and we’ve always been told that that’s no way to sell bread. But I took a German rye sourdough home and put it in the oven for a little while and it came out so wonderfully crusty and fresh that I ate the bread and my words as well.

Foodhall’s breads emerge on a timetable that is posted on the wall right next to the oven, which spews out fresh bread two or three times a day, and there’s a lot there — sandwich bread, garlic bread, high-fiber-cereal bread, keto herb bread, gluten-free multigrain / multi-seed, quinoa.

Baker’s Dozen has three stores in the city. You can walk in and pick from a variety of European and international breads like brioche (a slightly sweet cake-like bread made with more eggs, butter and milk), bagels, baguettes, pain aux cereales, cinnamon rolls and croissants, and they also do ragi bread and masala pav.

But the epiphany is Mer Konfekt. Tucked away in a residential building on Sophia Lane at Breach Candy, they make vegetarian breads without any maida. They use ancient grains and seeds like bajra, jowar, rajgira, shingoda, makai, nachni, soyabean, sprouted moong, chia and quinoa, to make just about everything. Breads, kulchas, tea cakes, biscuits, baked snacks, cookies, the lot. It’s perfect for those who love bread and cannot give it up. Like me. Such is my love for bread, that when I pray, God appears to me in the form of bread.