Milhem Cortaz opens bakery in SP and sells bread via WhatsApp – 09/08/2023 – Treats

With high quality flour and (a lot of) affection. It is with these ingredients that actor Milhem Cortaz works in his artisanal bakery, Cortaz O Pão, located in his own garage, in the São Paulo neighborhood of Perdizes. The first batches came out during the pandemic, when making bread, in addition to its therapeutic effect, was a way of creating a positive link with the world: daily production was donated to people in need.

Milhem’s initiative soon caught the attention of bakery equipment manufacturers. With an eye on their publicity potential, they would become partners in what, for him, is —more than a business— a dream and a means of reclaiming his own roots.

For the now baker, things started with a shock: “Suddenly, there was a dough maker in my garage!” The treat would just be the starting point. Milhem started dedicating himself to the new project: he learned a lot, met people in the area and was embraced by everyone.

It was, in fact, amidst hugs and selfies from fans of captain Fábio, from “Tropa de Elite”, Peixeira, from “Carandiru”, and Wando, from the series “Os Others” (Globoplay), that Milhem spoke to Folha report during Fipan (a fair for bakery and confectionery professionals), at the Gelopar stand, a company that offered him a freezer, fermenter and refrigerated bench.

With the gifts received, production went from homemade to artisanal. For three years, he has been selling to restaurants, including Pasquale Nigro’s [dono de uma cantina na Vila Madalena], which had lost an old supplier. “I made the same bread, with egg whites and lard; I just changed the flour — I used better flour,” she says.

“I use two flours, Wheat of Origin [Moageira Irati, no Paraná] and Fazenda Vargem, which I consider to be the best in Brazil”, he says. These companies are his partners also in terms of solidarity: “They sell to me and provide me with a quantity for free so that I can continue donating”.

For the actor, donating has a special meaning. “I want to continue making my bread, which I sell for R$40, also for a guy on the street to eat.” This is the spirit of his Pão Bom Para Todo Mundo project.

He imagines a kind of gear, in which partnerships with suppliers and small producers, inclusive production, workforce training, sales and donations are coordinated. Although he doesn’t hide the fact that, yes, he wants to make money from the venture, which he sees as a safe alternative for the future (“I want to grow old on bread”), his dream goes further.

Milhem remembers that many of the characters he played are “people from the margins”, to whom he wants to give back what they have given him in some way: “I am successful because I talk about them; I want to give all this back to them. Have you ever imagined a ‘ chain’, a guy who gets out of jail at 60? Nobody wants to catch him; so he can become a baker”.

The baker doesn’t lack excitement, but cooking has to be reconciled with the actor’s career. Milhem has just finished the first season of the solo show “Diário de um Louco”, based on a story by Nikolai Gógol, at CCBB-RJ, and is now diving into the filming of another series. In this work, the public will see him in a role different from those that made him famous, now flirting with the fantastic.

The pace of artistic activity and the increase in demand at the bakery would make him hire another baker, Joseph Káiroz, 27, from Paraíba. “We haven’t been together for a month and he already makes bread very similar to mine.” Today, the house’s flagship product is sourdough, naturally fermented bread, a process that ensures healthy, tasty and more digestible bread.

The bakery also produces brioche, ciabatta, focaccia, etc., in addition to almond bread (called “4th of April” to mark the date on which he first got his hands on dough), “broa de Milhem”, which takes cornmeal, wheat and baru seeds, and “Helena’s brownie”, a recipe from the actor’s 15-year-old daughter.

Milhem’s business involves the family and promotes their emotional reunion with their origins. The surname “Cortaz”, Lebanese, inherited from his father’s side, led to the play on words that became the bakery’s brand. The logo, however, contains the image of his maternal grandfather, the Italian Ozilio Avanci, whose home “in the countryside”, in Guarapari (ES), he remembers with affection.

“It was a place where you woke up with a lot of stuff on the table. My grandpa would skin the pig and make the bacon right away.” The story of his maternal grandfather, “a semi-literate man, married to a Portuguese teacher”, moves the actor and, for a moment, makes his voice choke.

Around the age of 15, Milhem would move to Italy and, later, back in Brazil, he would see his career in theater, TV and cinema take off, but even so, he would never stop feeling that he had commerce “in his blood”. . “If one day I stop, I’m going to open something, I’m going to sell knives, keys, I’m going to be a trader”, he said, more than ten years ago, in an interview with the Ponto de Virada program, on TV Cultura.

The actor’s old dream takes root in his grandfather’s land, with its little shops where you could buy everything — colored candy, batteries, cracklings, monkey intestines, slingshots, eggs, shampoo, rubber, loofahs, straws, pork, bread. And he says he would really like to have a bakery that was more or less like this.

The “pão da roça” is also a tribute to this grandfather. “This bread is my recipe. I leave the bottom burnt; I use rye, [farinha] integral, [farinha] white, buckwheat, Creole cornmeal, I make an angu…”,
He lists the ingredients like someone searching in the mists of childhood for the main one. “It’s memory bread.”

The dream of having a business that combines the emotional memory of your family with a social project has already begun to come true. “My bread will never be bitter, it will always taste like red earth. My bread has history.”

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Cut the Bread
Produces on demand. Receive the menu for the week and place your order via WhatsApp (11) 94743 5152. Bread can be collected from Thursday to Saturday, from 10am to 5pm