Delicious Portuguese tradition lives on

• Portuguese white and sweet bread made from scratch

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Food editor

The Holy Ghost Ladies roll each ball of their Portuguese bread dough into shape by hand before placing it snugly in a baking pan.

Agnes Lopes removes a tray of fresh baked Portuguese bread from the oven. The bread is sold to members of Holy Ghost Church who have standing orders and to Ah Fook and Takamiya stores.

Money raised from the sale of the Holy Ghost Ladies' Portuguese bread helped restore the Holy Ghost Church on Maui. The group is now helping to raise money for St. James 'Ulupalakua. Photos by Eugene Tanner • The Honolulu Advertiser

Holy Ghost Church Festa Noon -10:30 p.m. May 18; on May 19, events begin with 9:30 Mass with processional and a free lu'au and festival events until 5 p.m. On the grounds of the church, Kula, Maui

In the parish hall of Maui's landmark Holy Ghost Church, surrounded by the scent of egg-rich, lemony dough and yeasty baking bread, women who are grandmothers themselves recall their grandmother's bread. The stories flow as their hands swiftly form tender rounds of dough — stretch, turn, fold, tuck, smooth, pinch, pat, then on to the next one.

Baking bread in his Kailua kitchen, chef John Peru is right back in Portuguese camp on the Waialua plantation, steadying the porcelain-lined basin in which his dear "Vo" Phelomena kneaded the bread with her arms like pistons. If he flagged, she'd tease him in Portuguese: "No strength!" Mondays and Wednesday it was pâo branco, white bread; Saturdays, pâo dôce, sweet bread.

Bread was to a Portuguese kitchen as rice and noodles are to an Asian one: Made often, served daily, never wasted. Leftovers became sopas (sow-paszh) in which bread and milk or even bread and milky coffee, served as a morning meal or midnight snack, or acçorda (asordah), a family of bread soups in which dried crusts were combined with broth and whatever ingredients were on hand, such as meats, herbs, garlic, tomatoes or vegetables.

Today, Portuguese-style white bread is scarce and even sweet bread is baked primarily in commercial kitchens. There are some who still treasure handmade breads, however.

The Holy Ghost Ladies

"I hated baking day," one woman says vehemently, recalling her childhood. "We had to help pound the dough and it was hard." Heads nod all around. "We measured everything in MJB cans. MJB was the Portuguese coffee," recalls another. "Ho, that Portuguese stone bread; it had to last all week and it would get so hard!" More nods.

Now the women admit that they would give a lot for just a taste of those dense white loaves, baked in the family forno, the beehive-shaped ovens that dotted the landscape wherever Portuguese lived.

Every other Sunday, the "Holy Ghost Ladies" mix, shape, bake and bag 300 pans of "bolinhos" (buh-LINGSH) or rolls. In more than a decade of baking sessions, this all-volunteer committee has raised $400,000 to help renovate their church with its one-of-a-kind decor and gleaming silver dome, a landmark on the slopes of Haleakala. Now they're baking for St. James 'Ulupalakua down the road, which needs $200,000. And for next month's annual fund-raising Festa (fesh-ta), during which they will sell out of 500 pans of sweet bread.

Though "Holy Ghost Ladies" is a registered trademark, the group's luna is actually a gentleman, Charles Lopes of Kula; it is his mother's recipe on which the famed bread is based, though they have tinkered with it a good bit.

The rolls are all sold before they come out of the oven — to individual members of the church who have standing orders, and to Ah Fook and Takamiya stores. "If you ask for a loaf of bread," says Agnes Lopes, Charles' wife and the chief baker, "I'm sorry, I don't have one to give you."

What Agnes Lopes likes to call the "dough making dough" effort began in 1991. The baking team, which included quite a few elderly parishioners (several are older than 80 now and several have died in the intervening years), would arrive at the church every Monday at 2 a.m. and work until mid-morning. But this grueling schedule took its toll. "Monday, you were shot," Agnes Lopes said. So once the debts were paid off, the group moved to an every-other-Sunday schedule. Agnes Lopes prepares a dinner that all share before making their weary ways home.

But they enjoy their time together even though they're as regimented as a commercial assembly line. Charles Lopes mixes up the dough. Theresa Raynor turns it into pans for the first rising, reverently blessing each loaf three times with the sign of the cross. Then she portions out the dough — a pound and a quarter to each round. Catherine Morreira cuts the dough into pieces. And the ladies, seated at a long cafeteria table, shape the bolinhos and talk.

The subjects ebb and flow: traffic, kids, grandkids and the exact relationship of the reporter and photographer to everyone in the room. (In typical Maui style, one lady is a classmate's mother, another's niece is married to my cousin, everyone knows the photographer's family.)

"Portuguese — the only geese that can't fly," Agnes quips. "But we can talk," Vares chimes in.

"We have a lot of fun," Agnes says. "We're all family," Vares finishes.

Once the pans are shaped, checked and given a second rising so that each of the rounds grows into the next, they're baked in batches in the oven, each batch's start time chalked up on a board.

Beth Behrmann, a charter member of the group, asks that a couple of pounds of dough be set aside for her to be frozen for baking later. "It makes the best bread pudding — if you ever have any left over, that is," she said.

Looking around at the Hobart mixer, the commercial proofer that replaced the electric blankets they used to use to make the dough rise, and the ceiling-high commercial ovens, Raynor recalls, "They used to do this all by hand. Now that was work."

A chef's memories

John Peru, easily Hawai'i's best-known Portuguese chef and author of a Portuguese recipe collection, said his path to commercial kitchens (in hotels and at Hawai'i State Hospital) began at his grandmother's on the Waialua sugar plantation.

"I used to love to stay there. For some reason, she made everything not a chore, but fun. She never complained. She just worked," Peru said.

Phelomena Peru would rise before dawn, make breakfast for her husband and two bachelor sons, and begin baking bread before first light. The kitchen would be immaculate, her hair caught up in a kerchief, hands scrubbed.

The everyday bread was a simple loaf not unlike standard "French" bread consisting of just five ingredients — flour, white lard, salt, water and starter. Sweet bread days meant brown sugar they got free from the mill and eggs from her own chickens. Each baking day, she would refresh the starter — grated potatoes, sugar and a little flour, allowed to bubble and ferment for the two or three days between each baking session; this is what was used to make bread rise before commercial yeast became available.

Peru's grandfather built a pantry onto the plantation house kitchen where Phelomena's scrupulously tended kelemania (crock) of starter was stored. The dough — once it was mixed, kneaded and blessed with three signs of the cross, for Father, Son and Holy Ghost — would rise there under clean towels.

Outside, a fire would be burning, then dying down to ashes, on the floor of the forno. At baking time, John Peru would sweep the ashes into a grated bin below the oven floor. Phelomena would throw a little flour into the oven and could tell by eye if the temperature was right by how fast the flour browned and burned. If it was too hot, she'd mop the oven with wet rags tied to a stick.

Sweet bread was baked on banana leaves, which were first washed clean and then used to line the oven floor. "She loved the banana leaves; she said it gave a good flavor," Peru said.

Peru remembers his grandmother's instinctive hand in the kitchen. "Vo," he would ask in reference to how much of this or that to put in a recipe or how to tell when something was right, "How you know?" And she would shrug and say, "I know."