National TV appearance gives Sacramento baker a launchpad for Portuguese dishes

Jeremiah Duarte Bills was in his element.

It was bread week on ABC’s “The Great American Baking Show,” and contestants had just five hours to create a three-dimensional, holiday-themed bread centerpiece.

“The name of this dough in Portuguese is ‘massa sovada,’ which means ‘beaten dough,’” he explained to the camera. “This is Portuguese sweet bread.”

He was sculpting a Santa’s sleigh, baked over the back of the bowl and then mounted delicately atop scroll-shaped bread runners. In a separate pan, he prepared little bread gifts, complete with bread ribbons, to set in and around the sleigh.

‘Baked goods are like a religion for us’

This wasn’t Duarte Bills’ first massa sovada.

He grew up in a Portuguese family. “Bakeries, baked goods, breads ... it’s like religion for us,” he said.

Duarte Bills was always a picky eater, “a vegetarian that didn’t eat vegetables.” But he made an exception for massa sovada. It was a special-occasion food, something the family ate on holidays, and it always just felt special.

But Duarte Bills didn’t really fall in love with food until later. As a child, he was focused on music. He started playing flute when he was 10 years old and he got very good, very fast. The word prodigy was thrown around. He got into the San Francisco School of Music for his bachelor’s degree, then moved on to The Juilliard School for his master’s.

But in the midst of his musical studies, he stumbled into a new hobby: baking. During his undergraduate years in San Francisco, Duarte Bills had what he describes as a “food awakening.”

It was the early 2000s, Tartine Bakery had just opened and his friends told him he had to try it.

“That bakery changed my life,” said Duarte Bills. “I just had never tasted food that good.” He began making pilgrimages to farmers markets and fancy restaurants around San Francisco.

But it wasn’t enough just to eat the food. He wanted to bake, and he had an affinity for the flavors of Portugal — especially the pastries. Portuguese desserts are known for their use of egg yolks, sugar and spices. In past centuries, convents and monasteries would use egg whites to starch their linens, leaving extra yolks to be used up. At the same time, the country was rich with sugar from Brazil and Madeira, as well as spices from India.

Duarte Bills was searching for a deeper connection to his Portuguese heritage. “We immigrated here, and I need to understand that story so I can understand more about who I am,” he said.

He went out and bought a couple of Portuguese cookbooks, the only ones he could find that were actually written in English. And then he called his grandmother for help. Together, they began working through the recipes.

Duarte Bills continued to pursue music, all the while feeding his obsession with Portuguese baking. It was no longer enough for him to read cookbooks in English. He needed to learn Portuguese. So in the summer of 2004 he did a study abroad program in the Azores, immersing himself in the culture and the language.

“I started to eat the food there and visit the bakeries,” he said. “I loved it from the first taste.”

Regrouping in California

After graduating from The Juilliard School in 2008, Duarte Bills decided to stay in New York City and pursue a career in music. At first, there was lots of work. He played freelance gigs, toured Mexico with an orchestra, and started making some recordings.

But the good times only lasted for about a year. When the Great Recession hit, the work dried up and musicians all over the city were struggling. “You were lucky if you got one good gig a year,” said Duarte Bills. “Then the rest you were just scraping by.”

At the same time, he was flying around the country for orchestra auditions, competing with dozens of other flute players for a single opening.

“I made it to the final three for a job in Orange County,” he remembers. “I just gave everything I could for that audition. It was the final round, there were just three of us, and we’re going round and round and round. I just poured my whole heart out and then it was a no.”

It was draining. “I was just so burned out. I didn’t feel I could go on in the way I had been. And I really wanted a sense of stability.”

At that point, he needed to just get whatever job he could. He moved back to California to regroup.

‘The Great American Baking Show’

Duarte Bills now lives in the Pocket neighborhood of Sacramento with husband Jonathan, their cat and a hive of bees in the backyard. He’s been fascinated with bees since his college days, but couldn’t start his own hive in a big city. The homegrown honey is an added bonus.

In the years since he left New York City, he became increasingly adventurous with his bakes, culminating with his own engagement cake in 2015. It was an ambitious stacked cake with macarons and a croquembouche on top. “I literally threw every pastry trick at this engagement cake,” said Duarte Bills. “It was ridiculous.”

His friends kept telling him: You’ve got to do a competition.

So when he found out about “The Great American Baking Show,” he thought, “Let’s do it. Let’s apply. Let’s have some fun.”

Duarte Bills would ultimately make it to the final four before a bad meringue day sent him home in the sixth episode. But the show gave him some traction for the one thing he wanted do: share his love of Portuguese baking with the world.

He’s carved out a niche as a food personality, an ambassador of Portuguese cuisine. It’s a multimedia endeavor, and Duarte Bills does speaking engagements, leads pastry tours to Portugal and will soon be offering online baking classes.

He also co-hosts “Flour Hour,” a podcast with Amanda Faber, the Season 2 winner of The Great American Baking Show. The show covers everything from buttercream tutorials to interviews with bakers like Claire Ptak, creator of the royal wedding cake for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

He’s not looking to start a brick-and-mortar bakery, but he enjoys doing the occasional pop-up, and business is better than ever. Since the coronavirus shutdown, he’s done curbside pickup outside his own home. His “Mother’s Day Pop Up for Pick Up” sold out within hours and he followed it up with another pop up for Father’s Day.

And there’s an upcoming cookbook, devoted entirely to Portuguese desserts. His agent was just shopping the book around when COVID-19 put everything on hold.

“If no publisher wants this project then I will publish it myself, said Duarte Bills. “I want to give the world this book.”

Duarte Bills never gave music up completely, and he continues to teach, practice and compose.

“As a classical musician, we’re about precision,” he said. “So as a baker, that all just translates beautifully. ... When the precision is in its right place, then the soul — the creative voice — can really shine through.”

This story was originally published June 17, 2020 at 10:13 AM.