Linda Murphy| The Patriot Ledger
Forget chocolate bunnies, colored eggs or Peeps. Portuguese sweet bread is something to get egg-cited about during the Easter season. At Tony’s Bakery in Fall River, an area that boasts a hearty Portuguese population, the bread with the egg baked inside is in high demand. The egg is a symbol of new life in the Resurrection. Even famed Fall River chef Emeril Lagasse offers a recipe: his Portuguese 5-Egg Easter Bread.
Lighter and softer than white bread, Portuguese sweet bread is a year-round staple in Portuguese bakeries and markets. But with Easter Sunday just four days away, the delicately sweet and flavorful loaves of bread are being baked and sold double time. That makes for a frenzy, which is why Michelle Rioux, who took over her family’s bakery with her husband, Jeremy, last year, is planning on calling in the pros for Easter week – her parents, Antonio and Maria Amaral.
“They’ll be back to help out,” she said as she exchanged greetings in Portuguese with a customer and handed off sweet bread with eggs peeking out of the glossy crust.
Easter week at the bakery is “hectic, but I love it,” she said.
Her parents opened the bakery in 1975, a short time after her father drove by and saw the “for rent” sign in the window of the shop at 196 Columbia St. Antonio and Maria Amaral, who emigrated from Sao Miguel, developed the sweet bread recipe through trial and
error. They’ve served generations of local families.
“He had the hustle: he was the first one to get sweet bread into Stop & Shop,” Jeremy Rioux said.
Her parents, who lived in an apartment over the bakery with Michelle and her sister Sandra, worked seven days a week until they retired last year. At Easter, it was another issue altogether.
“They worked around the clock. My mom would sneak upstairs and turn his alarm clock off so he’d get a little extra sleep,” Michelle Rioux recalled.
The egg in the bread is a tradition, she said, that emigrants from Sao Miguel brought to this country.
“It was like an Easter egg hunt – it’s an island, they didn’t have very much, but they got an egg in the bread at Easter,” she said.
Growing up, Michelle worked at the bakery alongside her parents, but it wasn’t until last year, as her parents were preparing to retire, that they gave her the real hands-on lesson in getting the feel of working with the dough, which is even more challenging with the addition of the eggs.
“You put a cut in the dough and put in the egg, but you have to know when it’s the right texture. If you put it in at the wrong time it will collapse.” The uncooked egg bakes with the bread and is eaten as a special treat along with the sweet, airy loaves.
“Tony could look at a (sweet) bread and tell you what’s wrong with it – not enough sugar, too much sugar. It’s like they were his babies,” Jeremy said.
Today, with a team of bakers working late at night, the couple sell the bread at the bakery and in dozens of stores including Price Rite, Stop & Shop, Sam’s Club and Ocean State Job Lot. Called “massa sovada” in Portuguese with “flores” (eggs), the bread is available in a single roll with one egg, a small round loaf with two eggs, a large loaf with four eggs and a ring with six eggs.
