We all have an Achilles heel, that slice of kryptonite so seemingly insurmountable, we’re pressured to concede defeat. For Christopher Tan, this as soon as took the type of sourdough bread.
Tan is an award-winning Singaporean cooking teacher, photographer and author who has written extensively on meals tradition and heritage for over 25 years. He has authored or co-authored over 14 cookbooks together with the lauded The Way of Kueh, which chronicles Singapore’s wealthy repository of kueh.
And but, regardless of this wealth of expertise, Tan had his ‘mere mortal’ second with sourdough bread, the mastery of which continued to elude him for years… that’s till the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic pressured him to attempt his hand at it once more. And so years after making an attempt the not possible, Tan lastly nailed making sourdough bread.
Behold, Tan’s long-awaited excellent sourdough, the bread that impressed the ebook.
The trial-and-error and infinite apply rounds yielded the kernel of an thought for a brand new cookbook, one primarily based round baked items made with ferments of some type. And that’s how his newest cookbook NerdBaker 2: Tales from the Yeast Indies got here into being. The ebook serves as a sequel to his vastly in style 2015 cookbook NerdBaker.
“My previous book The Way of Kueh was published at the end of 2019. I was planning to spend 2020 travelling and recharging: however, after travelling up to Penang to launch the book there in February 2020, when I got back to Singapore we abruptly went into pandemic lockdown a few weeks later. So what could I do but stay at home and cook and bake, just like – it seemed – the rest of the world was doing?
“Baking was my first love – I started baking in earnest when I was 14 – and so I used the downtime to return to it. Notably, lockdown gave me the time to properly tackle growing a sourdough starter to bake sourdough bread with. In my first NerdBaker cookbook (which came out in 2015), I wrote a whole chapter on how I had tried to make sourdough for years but only met with failure – but in 2020 I finally met with success: the silver lining in the pandemic cloud.
Nerdbaker 2: Tales from the Yeast Indies was inspired by the time Tan spent baking during the Covid-19 pandemic and offers a range of recipes that all incorporate ferments.
“And as I was baking, and virtually communicating with my readers and other bakers on social media, I noticed how everyone was sharing stories and recipes and encouragement, in a we’ll-all-get-through-this-together, gotong royong kind of spirit. It was very nourishing and energising, and this is what moved me to write Tales From The Yeast Indies. I thought that it was perfectly fitting for it to be a sequel to NerdBaker.
“‘Yeast Indies’ is a term I coined to express how the best bakers (and fermenters) have strong ‘indie’ creative impulses and unique ways of looking at food and the world, and while they are independent and individual artists they are also deeply connected to the communities that they live/work/eat in. These are character traits I aspire to forge in myself, too,” says Tan.
Putting collectively the ebook
In placing collectively the cookbook, Tan checked out assembling recipes that fulfilled a number of checklists: they’d seldom been featured in English-language publications; they explored acquainted components in novel methods; and lastly, showcased his personal predilections and obsessions – each previous and present.
Tan is an exceptional author who has peppered his cookbook along with his personal sense of humour and character in addition to a transparent descriptive fashion and very, very exact methodology and directions.
Tan additionally needed to focus on the concept of creating incredible breads, cakes and kuih with out the necessity for components or emulsifiers.
With all this in thoughts, he set about creating a tenuous blueprint for the ebook, though along with his stage of expertise, this wasn’t as a lot of an uphill activity as one may think.
“Creating and refining recipes is pretty second nature by now. The ongoing and perpetual goal is to direct my energies in fruitful directions.
“I do start with a potential recipe longlist, but with the tacit understanding that it will evolve and morph during the writing process. Everything has to harmonise together. You also have to leave room for serendipity.
“For example, the pandan kaya butterkuchen was a relatively late addition to the final line-up, as I decided I needed one more item that was relatively simple to make but delivered maximum flavour bang for the buck. The idea itself had been percolating in my head for quite a while: I love traditional German butterkuchen, and it occurred to me that I could make it taste like kaya toast if I added little pockets of kaya,” he says.
Tan believes in being as clear as attainable in his cookbook, which is why lots of his recipes are accompanied by step-by-step pictorial guides to make sure readers don’t lose their method in the course of the baking course of.
Perhaps essentially the most difficult side of collating the ebook was the truth that Tan wrote the recipes and textual content, cooked all of the baked items and did the meals styling AND the images for each single meal he made. This concerned a complete lot of juggling to make sure he met his personal excessive requirements in addition to the requisite deadlines.
“The overarching challenges of wearing so many hats are always time management and file management! And hence also sleep management…” he says.
About the ebook
Tales from the Yeast Indies might be one of the crucial complete, well-written cookbooks available in the market. It is evident that Tan’s writing fashion is private – his sense of humour is clear on each web page within the ebook and so is his penchant for wordplay. “It is the number one memory foam pillow,’’ he writes about a kopitiam loaf.
Tan’s descriptive style meanwhile is unparalleled and it is almost as though you are right there watching him make each recipe. “This is it. This is my loaf, the star to which I have hitched my oven, my core raison d’aigrir which I will bake for the rest of my life,” he writes in regards to the sourdough bread he lastly perfected.
The ebook particulars a spread of recipes for each acquainted and unfamiliar bakes in addition to these which might be somewhat experimental. Pictured right here is Tan’s kopitiam loaf.
“All cookbook authors do their best to infuse themselves into their works – I believe that if you are passionate about the topics you write about and committed to exploring them with rigour, honesty and humour, your words will inevitably reflect your personality. Say it like you see it,” he says.
Tan can also be fastidious about itemizing down strategies and directions and has taken nice pains to {photograph} step-by-step processes to make sure readers don’t flail or fail. He even prescribes implements and ambient temperature that bakers ought to take note of when making their baked items – one thing you nearly by no means discover in cookbooks wherever.
For instance, Tan goes into elaborate element in regards to the utensils and instruments he himself makes use of, like an Indian blender, stand mixer, stainless-steel mixing bowls and so on. By letting readers into his personal kitchen and the methods and means he goes about gaining outcomes, he mainly demystifies processes concerned in finalising every product. It’s a refreshing addition that makes a lot distinction.
“As someone who has spent many years collecting, reading, using, writing and editing cookbooks, few things frustrate me more than vague or ambiguous recipe details. (I have many vintage cookbooks with recipes that end in “Masak sampai matang” or comparable…).
Tan’s stage of element is clear within the pages that painstakingly element the flours and starches that he makes use of to create his baked items.
“As a cooking instructor, I value the importance of clearly explaining things. Especially in baking, even small changes in parameters like room temperature and humidity and flour protein content can give rise to big differences in results. Being as clear and informative as possible, whether via lengthy descriptions, step-by-step pictorial guides, suggestions for ingredient substitutions and so on, encourages and empowers readers to start cooking.
“I also specifically wanted to address issues that bakers in the tropics have to deal with, such as persistently high room temperatures (especially these days!), and how to manage them in order to successfully bake sourdough and other breads. Baking books written by authors living in temperate climates almost never address these matters,” he explains.
The ebook paperwork a spread of recipes which have one widespread binding issue: all of them incorporate yeast in some kind. In the ebook, Tan writes intimately in regards to the ways in which yeast types – from the wild yeast species that populate sourdough bread to lactic acid micro organism which assist decide the funkiness of kimchi and tempoyak and acidify Chinese bun dough starters.
Tan additionally writes at size about moist yeasts, like tapai and fermented palm sap in addition to dry yeasts like immediate yeast, dietary yeast and crimson yeast rice.
In his ebook, whereas the overwhelming majority of the recipes name for fast yeast, there are recipes the place other ferments are required, like tapai ubi (fermented cassava), sake kasu, milk kefir and sourdough starters – simply so as to add some selection to the combo.
To create the recipe for this Parsi sugee cake, Tan turned to a recipe revealed in 1935.
So what sort of recipes are you able to anticipate to find by way of Tan’s fertile baking mind? An entire lot of thrilling stuff, that’s for certain.
Examples of recipes within the ebook embody kopitiam loaf, candy potato brioche, kue mangkok pandan, serabi telur, pineapple buns, fried Mangalore buns, kefir rava paniyaram, kompia, Parsi-style sugee cake and Tan’s hard-fought sourdough bread.
Historical nuggets
Another fascinating ingredient to the ebook is the historic richness that Tan serves up by using his spectacular investigative expertise to unearthing regional tales of yore related to baking.
For instance, do you know that previous to the arrival of dried yeast, toddy was used nearly completely as a leavening agent in native bakeries? In reality, Tan managed to dig up a Straits Times report from 1870 that estimated a necessity for 400 to 500 bottles of toddy by every of Penang’s massive bakeries!
In addition, the ebook additionally sheds mild on the Hainanese affect on baked items in Malaysia and Singapore and the truth that European bakeries have been a characteristic in then-Malaya from the late nineteenth century and churned out fancy breads, croissants, brioches, rolls and biscuits.
Serabi telur comes from the household of pancake-shaped kuih.
“I spend a lot of time in physical and virtual libraries. Readers who have my previous books will know that food heritage and history play a big part in my work. I always invest time in research, not just to unearth facts relevant to the recipes or topics I address in my books, but also to inform and deepen my perspective on foodways and culture, and to spark inspiration when I’m creating and refining new recipes. As Chef Pang Kok Keong said to me once – which I quote in my book The Way of Kueh – “Where are you going to go if you don’t know where you come from?”
“Hence I think that it benefits all of us to remember that port cities like Melaka and Singapore have histories that stretch far and deep, and that cuisines from other parts of the world have had a continuous presence in such cities for over a century (I mean, the fact that we even eat sliced sandwich bread at all…).
“I remember reading an advert in an issue of the Pinang Gazette from 1883 for a shop selling Western ice creams, puddings, pastries and wedding cakes! So when contemporary trends for French patisserie and the like reach our shores, they are only the latest manifestation of a longstanding familiarity, whether or not we’re aware of it.
Most of the recipes in the book, like the one for this sweet potato brioche, simply require the use of instant yeast.
“And before production and supply chain tech was good enough for fresh or dried baker’s yeast to reliably survive packaging and transportation to Asia, fresh palm toddy was widely used as a leavening agent for bread in our region.
“As I understand it, toddy shops in Malaysia are much fewer in number today than there were decades ago, and Singapore has not had a physical toddy shop since 1979, so it’s not very surprising that modern generations aren’t aware of its former importance.
“Our mothers and grandmothers would have been aware of toddy’s role in making traditional kuih-muih such as apam kampung and bika ambon,” he says.
NerdBaker 2: Tales from the Yeast Indies is accessible at Kinokuniya KLCC, Tsutaya and MPH Bookstores.
