“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,” recalls Tan while sipping his iced chai at a pulled-tea shop in Singapore’s Arab Street.
“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 do not take into account room temperature and humidity in tropical places such as Singapore, where the mercury hit 36 degrees Celsius (97 degrees Fahrenheit) in March, he adds.
That is when Tan, 51, began envisioning the possibility of another book, NerdBaker 2: Tales from the Yeast Indies, on which he started working in 2021.
Not only did he rigorously test recipes for baked goods from places as diverse as Malaysia, Singapore and Japan to Hong Kong, Indonesia and India, but also photographed them all using natural light streaming from his kitchen window.
One, called Dim Sum in Hong Kong, documented traditional Hong Kong dim sum from the 1950s to the 1980s. While the recipes were written in English and Chinese, the glossary was not 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 also irks him that YouTube videos teach people how to make youtiao using milk, eggs and yeast so that they puff up more dramatically. While Instagrammable, they quickly go 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 only recipe specifically created for the book was 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.
Not only does he present his recipe with the fruit that people either love or hate, he also sings its praises over two pages in NerdBaker 2, under the title, “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 book NerdBaker: Extraordinary Recipes, Stories & 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 first book, which is both 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 fondness for baking began when he was 14 years old, when his father got a job in Britain and moved the family 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 career, Tan has written and edited numerous food stories, but 15 years ago he began teaching others how to cook and bake, and discovered he enjoyed passing on his knowledge to others.
When he launched NerdBaker 2 in January, at a bookstore on Singapore’s Orchard Road, many of his students came, along with his fans.
“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 a laugh.
“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.”
