“She was like, ‘But knowing your expertise in other areas and your perspective, you can still teach those of us who have been doing sourdough for a while a different way to look at it.’ So that kind of got me thinking,” remembers Tan week sipping his iced chai at a pulled-tea store in Singapore’s Arab Boulevard.
“A lot of sourdough books are written in temperate countries, and a lot of the instructions don’t apply here because our weather is so different. I can’t be the only one struggling with this,” he says.
The books don't bear in mind room temperature and humidity in tropical playgrounds comparable to Singapore, the place the mercury strike 36 levels Celsius (97 levels Fahrenheit) in March, he provides.
This is when Tan, 51, started envisioning the potential of any other conserve, NerdBaker 2: Stories from the Yeast Indies, on which he set to work in 2021.
No longer most effective did he conscientiously take a look at recipes for baked items from playgrounds as numerous as Malaysia, Singapore and Japan to Hong Kong, Indonesia and Bharat, but in addition photographgraphed all of them the use of herbal luminous streaming from his kitchen window.
One, referred to as Lightless Sum in Hong Kong, documented conventional Hong Kong dark sum from the Nineteen Fifties to the Eighties. Future the recipes have been written in English and Chinese language, the word list was once no longer translated.
“To get the bursting top for a char siu bao, it’s actually mainly from baking powder, not from the yeast itself. And that’s something that books don’t tell you,” he says.
“I wanted to present that because I have not seen this in cookbooks in English, the real old-school way of doing it.”
It additionally irks him that YouTube movies train public manufacture youtiao the use of milk, eggs and yeast in order that they blow his own trumpet extra dramatically. Future Instagrammable, they briefly move limp.
“My recipe is tailored for old-school crispiness – just flour, seasoning and non-yeast leaveners,” he says. “I have old Hong Kong cookbooks and Chinese-language cookbooks.
“I study the recipes and try out their techniques and try to figure out what works with today’s ingredients because they are not the same – baking powder and flour are not the same.”
“I had travelled to Germany for work, to attend a cookware expo, and was dazzled by all the bakeries there. You can walk into any bakery there and everything comes in huge trays and there are so many things.
“I’ve loved this bread ever since and I was thinking maybe I can make it taste like kaya toast,” he says.
The one recipe in particular created for the conserve was once the Durienne Tropezienne.
“I was looking on Instagram and everyone is into layered doughs and all these weird-shaped croissants and things, which are still trending, and slashing sourdough, and I was like, ‘Why can’t I do a durian shape? And then I figured out how to do it,” he chuckles.
No longer most effective does he provide his recipe with the fruit that public both love or abhor, he additionally sings its praises over two pages in NerdBaker 2, below the identify, “The Glory of Durian”.
“The pulp’s texture will invite comparisons: toothpaste-soft, satin-smooth, pudding-creamy, caramel-sticky, boarding-school-custard-thick, coating your mouth like a dense nut butter or slipping down as lightly as a mousse. It might be as starchy as sweet potato purée, or lightly fibrous like a banana,” he writes.
Tan says NerdBaker 2 is the sequel to his 2015 conserve NerdBaker: Atypical Recipes, Tales & Baking Adventures from a True Oven Geek, which he describes as “a sleeper hit”.
“It sounds really strange to say, but it came out before baking became a thing, before the pandemic,” says Tan of the primary conserve, which is each a memoir and a cookbook.
“Even my publisher thought it was slightly risky, and was like, ‘I don’t know who’s going to read this book,’ because they had not been baking.”
Tan’s keenness for baking started when he was once 14 years impaired, when his father were given a role in Britain and moved the public there.
“Baking was my first love […] and bread was the first thing [I made]. And that was just after my parents and I moved to the UK.
“So suddenly, all these ingredients were much more easily available to me, like good flour and good milk, and yeast, and I just started baking.”
Over his occupation, Tan has written and edited diverse meals tales, however 15 years in the past he started educating others prepare dinner and bake, and came upon he loved passing on his wisdom to others.
When he introduced NerdBaker 2 in January, at a bookstall on Singapore’s Orchard Street, a lot of his scholars got here, in conjunction with his lovers.
“This lady came up, she said, ‘You know, I have all your books, but I haven’t cooked a single thing. That’s just my bedtime reading.’
“I was like, ‘No, no, no, you have to get into the kitchen. I write them to empower you,’” he says with fun.
“I’ve had some students who have been coming to my classes for 12 years. They have stuck with me that long. I think it’s because they do go home and they do make my recipes and they work for them. So they’re always keen to learn more.”
