MUMBAI, India— The Yazdani Bakery team wakes up every morning when Mumbai sleeps to knead dough, chop it into tiny bits, then toss it into the oven. They are ready by sunrise with their most well-liked product, a thousand pieces of pav, which flies off the shelves right away upon bakery opening.
Pav has a light, fluffy texture and a clear smokey taste from its crusty top. It looks like a Parker House roll only the dough of the pav lacks egg. The name comes from the Portuguese language, pao, which is their bread word. Arriving in India with Portuguese traders who had traveled into surrounding ports more than 600 years ago, it carried a taste of home.
When the port city was developing as a textile center and attracting workers from surrounding towns and villages to its cotton spinning and weaving mills, it developed as a street food staple in the 19th century.
Referring to Mumbai by its former name, Mumbai-based culinary anthropologist Kurush Dalal notes “Pav is what Bombay’s working-class blue-collar workers were eating, especially those who were far from home without the infrastructure to create Indian food for them.”
