Pão francês
Brazilian bread roll
Pão francês (Portuguese: [ˈpɐ̃w̃ fɾɐ̃ˈse(j)s] ; lit. 'French bread') is a short cylindrical bread roll with a soft white crumb and a golden crispy shell that is popular in Brazil. This bread has different names throughout the different states in Brazil such as pãozinho (little bread), pão de sal (salt bread), cacetinho (little baton), carioquinha (little Carioca), pão de água (water bread), pão Jacó (Jacob bread), pão filão (loaf bread), pão aguado (watery bread), and pão careca (bald bread). It is derived from a French bread called Petit pain.
Pão francês is the most popular bread in Brazil. A 2019 study by Puratos found that 95.7% of the residents of the city of São Paulo eat pão francês. According to Sampapão (the São Paulo Bakery and Confectionery Industry Union and Association), more rolls of pão francês are baked every day in the city of São Paulo than there are residents.
March 21 is Pão Francês Day in Brazil.
History
While the exact origin of pão francês is unknown, there are several theories of how it was created. One theory is that pão francês was invented in the 1900s by wealthy Brazilians who asked French bakers to teach them how to bake the baguettes that they encountered in their visits to France. Despite using the same base ingredients, the shape of pão francês differed from the baguettes that they were based on as they were smaller and rounder.
“Pão francês” enters the record as brazilian bread roll. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what francês, Brazilian and bread can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pão francês” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.