Daily Archives: April 22, 2015

A CONVERSATION WORTH SHARING

You Feed Us, We Feed You.

“How Long Can Your Bread Last, Tommy?”

This is a question from many of my customers everyday. And I have been trying very hard to find a way to reply.

I look at every single loaf in my shelf and I ask them: Can “you” please tell me how I should reply to every single patron who might be bringing “you” home?

Bread: “Tommy, we have been nurtured, raised and baked here by you in your city. Your city folks have been introduced to bread that has brought great convenience to their lives for their economic and financial values. Bakers like you know how we naturally aged like every single human being.
Listen carefully to their question again. Do you think this question can be applied to how we are raised and baked?
Is a modern question; is a question from folks who have been raised and assured by the social convenience of modernization which leads to fear of wastage when they bring us home.
Please be fair to us, we are not those breads that you used to raise by your engineering skills to keep us soft and pretentiously fresh. But you insisted that we can survive in your culture. You quarrel with your customers not to pre-sliced us because we are too fresh and need to be matured and be retaining our freshness as a whole loaf blah blah blah…
We feel weird, we feel out of our natural context where we should be existing. However, it has never felt better in a context of being re-invited to be masticated by your patrons.
Don’t worry, as long as you nurture our culture, raise us in your environment, let us do the rest…nobody can communicate the sense of taste better than us. We know who NEED us and who WANT us. We are sorry being so inconvenient for most of your patrons. However, is not only about us, is also about development of taste and time.

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A CONVERSATION WORTH SHARING

A BREAD HAS TO BE GOOD TO THINK BEFORE IT IS GOOD TO EAT

“Dear Tommy,

Good morning to you! Writing this message while savouring you baguette sprinkled with mozarella cheese…simplest yet tastiest! If you don’t mind replying, can I check with you re the term: sprouted bread? Came across this word lately as I googled for suitable food for eczema patients and the bread is strongly recommended. I read in your website that your bread all goes through tedious fermentation process to bring out the nutrients, enzymes etc of a bread. So is this also termed as sprouting the bread? Then I am on the right track as we are consuming your bread! Bravo! Well, although not daily as we make a trip to your shop from Bandar Utama once a week…

Have a great day ahead!! Cheers!”

BU

Dear BU,

Sprouted bread is a bread made with sprouted wheat grains. Sprouted wheat are usually added to regular bread recipes in the form of whole grain, paste or dried powder as malt. But most of the content in the bread is flour. Flour is milled from non sprouted wheat grains.Sprouted Wheat GrainsFirst, you might want to ask yourself, what happen when wheat is sprouted. To sprout grains, we need water to dampen the grain. During this soaking process, a significant amount of phytic acids (which is an inhibitor in most grains and legumes) starts to break down. Gluten in the wheat also gets broken down for better digestion eventually.

I personally believe that consumption of high phytic acid products in the long run will weaken our body immune system because it inhibits our body to absorb 4 main minerals (iron, zinc, magnesium and calcium) which is fundamental for growth.

Therefore, similar to sprouting wheat, flour also needs to have a significant amount of timespan in water. In making bread, the longer the fermentation process, the longer will the flour be soaked in water before we turn it into real noble bread. Fermentation is a process to cultivate taste in bread with yeast or natural leaven but also simultaneously soaking flour to breakdown complexity of nutrients for human digestion.

I subject all my breads to a tedious process with pre-ferments we culture in the shop, main purpose is to breakdown as much as possible the complexity of grains/flour. I have always say this to many people: If we do not respect the nature, the nature will harm us. So, respecting the fundamental of fermentation is my business.

I have many customers facing the same problem as you with bread. Stomach bloating, eczema etc…I have a bakery today and I can tell you this is an alarming social problem. But don’t panic and don’t blame other breads. This social problem can be understood by reading social history, in this case, the social history of bread. Malaysia don’t know so much about history I am talking about because the bread we know until today was introduced much later by the English after their post war industrialisation…so to say, our bread is already “modern”. Everybody needs to go to work and build their country after war, so no time to make bread. Bakery also cannot supply the amount of bread a household needed. So build factories, make lots of bread in the shortest amount of time to feed the population. What population? The population of “baby-booms” after war. So these population of baby-booms ate a lot of “no-time” bread during economy growth. So i guess you can imagine how much mineral deficiency they already suffered. If a mother cannot absorb the minerals when she was carrying her baby, how can her baby be born to be full “mineralised”? And I guess, this is why ppl blame gluten. This modern disease of gluten intolerant has taken such a huge hooha. If gluten is so dangerous, all the civilisations that eat bread would have vanished by now.

This model of industrialisation was entirely reproduced in Asia and hence Malaysia kena! The methodology in milling to bread production we know until today, is modernised already.

Lastly, please don’t just polarized on bread. Your daily stable is not ONLY on bread. Other foodstuff in our economy also suffered from similar disrespectful treatment that eventually will surface on our skins! In this case, A BREAD HAS TO BE GOOD TO THINK BEFORE IT IS GOOD TO EAT! So think about other food you eat also.

My breads are very inconsistent. I constantly neglect the image that consumers form of bread, because I know is an image that would influence their taste. And I enjoy telling ppl that I am selling inconsistency because I have a point to make. GOOD-LOOKING BREAD IS NOT ALWAYS GOOD BREAD.

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