Robert Yeo - Nerdbaker: Extraordinary Recipes

Copyright 2015 Christopher Tan

Edited by Samantha Lee
Designed by Yong Wen Yeu

All rights reserved.
Published in Singapore
by Epigram Books.
www.epigrambooks.sg

National Library Board, Singapore
Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Tan, Christopher, 1972- author.
NerdBaker : extraordinary recipes,
stories & baking adventures from a true oven geek / Christopher Tan.
Singapore : Epigram Books, 2015.

pages cm
ISBN : 978-981-4615-77-8 (paperback)
ISBN : 978-981-4615-76-1 (ebook)

First Edition

ADDICTIONS, OBSESSIONS & ENDANGERED SPECIES
Bakes which keep my pilot light burning

RELATIVELY SPEAKING
Kith and kin in crust and crumb

TREKS & THOUGHTS
To travel hungrily is better than to arrive full

HYBRID VIGOUR
When worlds and kitchens collide

TOOLS & GADGETS
Batterie fuel for inspiration

In the early 2000s, while researching a cookbook-cum-memoir, I made umpteen trips to Southeast Asia. I had heard from food guru colleagues that there was a journalist in Singapore who really, really knew his stuff. I emailed to propose we meet. Raffles Place train station, just outside the turnstiles, he returned. Ill be the chubby Asian guy in glassesa characteristically self-deprecating description that helped me spot Chris immediately. We ended up eating far more than we had good reason to. As we sat there, I could tell we'd be friends for life.

Since then, Ive discovered that every encounter with Chris is an uncommon adventure in food.

When I was putting together an article on pandan, a beloved Southeast Asian aromatic leaf thats underappreciated elsewhere, I travelled to Singapore to seek Chris help. We started at Tekka Market in Little India, where, hed forewarned, the particular variety of pandan he'd specially ordered was gigantic. I was expecting big leaves. I wasnt expecting them to be nine feet long. We bought a sheaf, along with regular pandan and all sorts of sweet and savoury dishes that used pandan as a flavouring. We somehow convinced a taxi driver that we could get these monstrous tropical leaves and all this food into his car. At my hotel, we made it past the front desk to my room, where we photographed all of it. Then we ate what we could. And then we ate some more. By the end, we had created this phenomenal, nestlike messa foodie take on the kind of disarray rock stars used to leave their hotel rooms in. It took at least five increasingly hilarious calls to housekeeping before someone was willing to cart our pandan jungle away. I was a bit put out. Chris, having feasted, was in heaven.

The Chris that you, too, will get to know through this intensely personal, incredibly useful book is one of the most fervent food lovers on any continent. His expertise in Southeast Asian cuisines can fairly be called obsessive, but what sets him apart is his exploratory knowledge of so many of the worlds cooking traditionshes lived and travelled all over the globe.

A passionate home baker and cooking teacher, he seems to me a kind of food whisperer, divining after one bite what a particular dish is all about, what went into its creation, and what its influences are.

His culinary intelligence, generous spirit and exquisite sensitivity to provenance fills these pages, whose deep-dives into such diverse dishes as a classic French boule, a Japanese curry bread, and, yes, a Portuguese pandan po de deus, explode what you thought you knew about baking while stoking your appetite, your imagination and your desire to cook.

James Oseland, editor-in-chief, Rodales Organic Life, and author of Cradle of Flavor

I am the child of many ovens. My family oven, for which I helped my grandma prep hundreds of Lunar New Year cookies, in which my mother would bake kue lapis legit that steadily, stripily rose in its tin, layer by fragrant layer. The oven of my childhood neighbour Mrs Chong, whose amazing pies and curry puffs I could smell from over the fence. The oven of our small suburban bakery, which in the 1970s was all about custard puffs, chocolate-riced rum balls and how many plastic ornaments one could possibly cram onto a thickly buttercreamed birthday cake. Rather more posh hotel bakery ovenshow I miss the Marco Polo Cake Shops strawberry tarts and hot cross buns. The oven at Yaohan department store, rolling out red bean anpan buns for ravenous hordes.

As a kid, I was picky about vegetables and spices, but vacuumed up any starchy thing not nailed downpancakes, biscuits, buns without end I was omnicarbivorous. My food world expanded after I moved to London with my family in my early teens. To ease the culture shock, I inhaled books, TV, music and more books. When not in bookshops, I sought solace at supermarkets, where ingredients abounded in a variety Id never before seen, even staples like sugars and flours. And the milk! The milkmana nursery-rhyme abstraction now made realleft our glass bottle order on the doorstep every morning, contents encoded by its foil cap: blue was skimmed (yuk), striped blue semi-skimmed, red normal, silver richer, gold top the best of all, an inch of thick cream floating at its zenith. Baked into custards and quiches, it made my awkward teenage phase more palatable, if no less awkward.

Clearly the pear was unstatisfactory.

At high school, the cool kids went in for drama, covert smoking and doing everything ironically, even walking. I dove deep into biology, chemistry and advanced maths by day, and churned out chocolate roulades by night. I went on to study psychology at university, a fact which surprises many people until I point out that baking is the most affordable form of therapy there is. (Had you asked me Whats your major?, I would have replied, Kenwood.) The healing regimen I inflicted on university mates included pizza, lasagna, pies, naan, and once (but never again), baked Alaska for 40 people. I learnt a lot in those years, less from the hits than from the failures, like the blueberry-orange sticky buns at which a friend exclaimed Oh these are so nice!, followed by They smell just like soap!... but really nice soap!

After graduation, my writing job at a food magazine afforded me a grounding in European bakings formal rules, as well as a ringside seat for how chefs had started breaking them.

I hung out at professional pastry competitions and interviewed mad geniuses who electrified audiences with their command of the whisk.

I watched the dividing walls between modern patisserie, performance art and hightech engineering stretch as thin as filo. I also sat at the feet of traditional cooks, and began collecting old recipe texts for their time-tested perspectives. I became more determined to improve the rigour and artfulness of my home baking.

Eventually I went freelance, which let me balance writing stints with teaching, speaking and penning cookbooks. And the bake goes on.

In todays culinary ecosystem, home cooks look to chefs for inspiration and trend cues, while chefs look to other chefs and farmers. However, in old cookbooks and memoirs, I glimpse eras when home cooks drove a lot of innovation, when some of the most interesting, creative gastronomy happened in private. I believe the tide is slowly turning that way again. Hobby bakers are reclaiming the home kitchen as fertile ground, now with blogs, social media, and even reality shows to make their efforts visible. I salute them. They are my tribe.