Was Kerala’s first egg puff made here? Inside a Kochi bakery founded in 1939

Walk into almost any bakery in Kerala and the display will have a familiar line-up: egg puffs, meat puffs, vegetable puffs, and several variations of the flaky snack. Their ubiquity makes them seem much older than they are.

Cochin Bakery traces its arrival in Kerala to the 1960s. According to the family that runs the bakery, meat-filled puffs came first. The boiled egg entered the pastry a few years later, producing a snack that would eventually become a bakery staple across the state

To explore that account, Onmanorama travelled to Cochin Bakery, which was established in Kochi in 1939.

This is the latest instalment of Served Since, Onmanorama Food & Travel’s series on Kerala’s old eateries and the histories preserved within them.

Four brothers from Thalassery
In 1939, four brothers from Thalassery – M P Karunakaran, M P Achuthan, M P Kumaran and M P Balakrishnan – arrived in Kochi to establish a bakery. They had learnt the trade under Mambally Bapu, widely regarded as a pioneer of Kerala’s bakery industry.

Their first outlet opened on Cannon Shed Road, near the old boat jetty. In its early years, the shop did not even have a formal name.

“At first, people simply called it ‘the bakery.’ Later, we decided to name it after the city itself,” recalls M P Ramesh, director of Cochin Bakery and son of founder M P Achuthan.

Bakery where Basheer sold books

Cochin Bakery’s history is also intertwined with the early years of Vaikom Muhammad Basheer.

Before becoming one of Malayalam’s most celebrated writers, Basheer walked the streets of Ernakulam selling his books. Ramesh says his father gave Basheer a shelf and a seat inside the bakery from which to sell them.

“His address at one point was ‘Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, C/o Cochin Bakery.’ Writers like G Sankara Kurup and M P Paul would come here to meet him. Cochin Bakery even became a character in some of his writings,” he says.

Before the puff came bread
Before puffs appeared on its shelves, Cochin Bakery was known for its bread. Many customers then called it “gothambu appam”. The bakery supplied bread to the palace of the King of Cochin and also fulfilled orders routed through the Indian Coffee House. Flour was rationed at the time, and its quality was not always reliable. Ramesh recounts an occasion when a consignment of stale bread reached the palace and the bakery’s licence was cancelled.

The owners explained that the bread had been made with poor-quality rationed flour. The licence was subsequently restored, and better flour was ordered for the bakery, he says.

How egg entered the puff
According to Ramesh, puff pastry reached Kerala’s commercial bakeries in the 1960s. Cochin Bakery brought in a baker from Bombay to teach its workers the technique. “Puff pastry came to Kerala in the 1960s. We brought a baker from Bombay to teach us how to make them,” he says.

The earliest puffs sold by the bakery contained mutton. As its price rose, chicken became an alternative. Beef puffs subsequently found popularity in places such as Kottayam. “When mutton became expensive, we started making chicken puffs. Later, beef puffs became popular in places like Kottayam,” Ramesh says. The egg puff followed in the early 1970s. Until then, boiled eggs were more commonly used at the bakery to make egg bajji.

“Egg puffs became popular around 1973-74. Before that, we used to make egg bajji by dipping boiled eggs in gram flour batter and frying them,” he recalls.

The bakers then tried replacing the meat filling in a puff with a boiled egg. The experiment produced a cheaper snack that appealed to a wider range of customers. While the meat-filled versions remained popular, the egg puff gradually became a fixture in bakeries across Kerala.

More than puffs
Puffs were only one part of Cochin Bakery’s identity. Its other well-known products included Japanese cake, butter beans, tea rusks, and bread. Ramesh says members of Cochin’s royal family were regular customers and that the bakery also served dignitaries such as Lord Wavell and Lord Mountbatten. As members of the family established bakeries in different parts of Kerala, they took their Thalassery baking traditions with them.

Learning the business from the bakery floor
Ramesh grew up around the bakery and later spent several years working alongside his father.

“I didn’t just observe my father. I worked with him for six or seven years and learnt every part of the business,” he says.

At 19, he moved to the family’s Changanassery outlet. He says its daily sales eventually increased from about ₹100 to ₹13,000. In 1986, on his father’s 75th birthday, Ramesh opened Cochin Bakery’s first outlet in Kozhikode.

“Birthday cakes weren’t common in Kozhikode then. Cakes were made only on order. We introduced many new products there,” he recalls.

He later expanded the business to Mangaluru. In 1992, he developed what became the bakery’s signature ghee cake. “More than opening branches, I focus on making quality products. I like creating items that aren’t available anywhere else,” he says.

Record-sized cake
In 2006, Cochin Bakery entered the Limca Book of Records with a 217-foot cake decorated with 172 images depicting national leaders, notable events, and celebrities. Nearly nine decades after the first outlet opened on Cannon Shed Road, the bakery continues to produce bread, cakes, and the snack now found in almost every Kerala bakery: the egg puff.

The egg puff no longer belongs to any one shop. But at Cochin Bakery, its story is traced to an experiment in the early 1970s, when its bakers placed a boiled egg inside the pastry they had learnt to make only a few years earlier.