Christopher Tan, the Singaporean food writer, historian, and baking teacher, is an exceptional talent. I was initially taken by his work because of his meticulous recipes and deep dives into SE Asian heritage baking, but later because of the way he connects the past to the present, tying together history, technique, and memory in a way that makes you see the world of flour, sugar, and spice a little differently.
While in the UK, we tend to frame baking traditions as either “classic” or “modern,” Christopher’s work dismantles that binary, showing how tradition constantly evolves while remaining deeply rooted in place. His latest book, Nerdbaker 2: Tales from the Yeast Indies, is a sweeping exploration of Singaporean, Malaysian, and World baking generally, but it’s also a love letter to how global influences shape what we eat. It’s a book filled with detail and care, beautifully designed and rich with stories that connect the familiar with the unexpected.
Christopher doesn’t just document recipe, he interrogates them, questions their origins, and shows how they’ve travelled, changed, and adapted. It was a good time to finally speak with him about his book, the state of baking in Singapore, and how we navigate a world where food traditions can be both fiercely preserved and effortlessly remixed.
Dan: Hi Christopher, and congratulations on your book “Tales from the Yeast Indies”. It covers a huge number of different styles of baking from around the world and I particularly wondered about your approach here. Was your intention in doing this way to appeal to readers around the world; or perhaps to represent the breadth of baking in Singapore and Malaysia. Or a mixture of the two?
Christopher: This book was birthed from a few strongly interconnected key motivations. Firstly it was a COVID pandemic baby, conceived from not being able to do much but stay at home and bake, fuelled by all the inspiration and encouragement I soaked up while seeing how bakers connected and shared with each other online and through other remote means.
I wanted “Tales from the Yeast Indies” overall to celebrate the ways in which Asian baking cultures have developed their own idioms and have diverged from European or American baking, even though those have seeded Asian baking in the past. Having connected with many of my overseas readers through Instagram during the pandemic, I wanted to introduce them to what may be entirely new paradigms for those unfamiliar with how we bake over here. At the same time, I also wanted to set down in detail for readers in Singapore and Malaysia recipes for our very traditional and beloved local items – like the soft loaves we use for kaya toast, and really proper restaurant-style char siew bao, and the deep-fried breads – which I have never seen fully explained in English before.
Another catalyst was watching the first season of The Great Australian Bake Off on which you were a judge, Dan – I noticed that the Aussie contestants seemed to be much more au fait with Asian and Middle Eastern baking mores and techniques than the British contestants on the original UK series. And then of course seeing wonderful books by authors like Bryan Ford (with “New World Sourdough”) and Abi Balingit (with “Mayumu – Filipino American Desserts Remixed”) proves that there is a hunger among readers to learn about global baking traditions. I think that really curious and intrepid bakers (for whom “Tales From The Yeast Indies” is named!) will always want to vault over map boundaries.
Dan: Absolutely share you love for wonderful Bryan Ford, but also you’ve now put Abi Balingit on my radar. Tell me, when you’re writing recipes for a well-known baking item, say for a sourdough loaf in 2024 when recipes for it are everywhere, are you looking for a particular personal angle?
Christopher: Well, during the pandemic, I finally had the time and focus to get my sourdough mojo working, after years of trying and failing! And I realised that making sourdough in tropical conditions was something that few of the existing books at that time seemed to address or acknowledge – for example, the room temperature in, say, Oslo is not the same as where I am in Singapore. Hence I really wanted to address this in my book for readers in the same situation. I wrote that chapter from the position of someone who had only been baking sourdough for a while, but focused on finding an approach that worked in our conditions – engaging with readers more as a fellow acolyte than a pundit.
Dan: Ha! Fantastic answer, makes perfect sense as that cliché from baking recipes “leave at room temperature” of course will depend on where in the world you are. And I hope my question didn’t come across defensively, I just often wonder this about recipes where there are many version already written. Christopher, as a long-time food writer and teacher, how do you balance evolving your own recipes with embracing new ideas from younger bakers, without seeming old-fashioned or dismissing their enthusiasm?
Christopher: What you’re positing is very on point – I honestly feel that every recipe is perpetually a work in progress. This is why I strongly dislike using the word ‘perfect’ to describe or title a recipe – ‘the perfect chocolate chip cookie’ or ‘the perfect sponge cake’, etc. To declare a recipe is ‘perfected’ would deny it any change of future improvement – who’s to say I won’t make a better version next week, because I learn a new technique or find a new ingredient?
I constantly fiddle with recipes that I have been baking for yonks, just to see how far they can flex – for example, recently I’ve been exploring different ways of employing the ‘reverse creaming’ method in cakes and pastries, which I first learned about from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Cake Bible over 25 years ago. But also, I can get much higher quality flours now that I could even 6 or 7 years ago, so it bears fruit to keep adjusting and tinkering with bread recipes especially.
As triggered as I might get at someone else’s fixations or rediscoveries of the wheel – like how tangzhong is now suddenly all the rage in the West, even though its close cousins bruhstuck and zavarka have been around for ages in Europe – if I am in a position to help fan the flame of their passion for food, then it behoves me to do so as gently and encouragingly as I can, because that’s the important thing and that’s what I would wish for, were I in their shoes.
I feel it is so true that the more I learn about food, the more I realise I still need to learn. This crucially also helps me to empathise with other approaches to cooking, and hence to glean things from them which can have meaning for me.
Dan: Absolutely with you here. I also feel as I get older, in many ways, I know less as the complication and variation in the world is much clearer to me today. You write in the book about both the changes you’ve seen in baking in Singapore but also how many of the themes have long been a part of Singapore’s rich culinary and social history over hundreds of years. In your recent memory have there been any baking trends that have surprised you: ones that you didn’t think would take hold but did?
Christopher: Hahahaha! We experienced the great fancy macaron deluge of the early 2000s – I never understood why they became so popular here for a time. Too sweet, often too garishly coloured, and quick to just die an ignoble death in our humidity. One time a friend of mine flew back here from a trip to Paris and convened our gang to quickly tuck into a box of Pierre Hermé’s macarons that she hand-carried – only then did I properly understand how good they could be, but then this made me all the more bewildered at how macarons that fell far short of Pierre’s could still inspire such devotion among anyone.
Dan: I’ve read online of your Christian faith, and I wondered if it throws up any challenges with your cooking and teaching in a country like Singapore that encompasses many different faiths?
Christopher: To be honest – not at all. Singapore is such a polyglot, polycultural nation, thanks to its centuries as a port city, that interfaith interactions are just an everyday part of life. When I was young, my Indian neighbour would gift us with food at Diwali, and we would do the same for her at Chinese New Year. Insofar as our personal beliefs permit, we all enjoy each other’s festival foods. It would be unremarkable to us to see that F&B operations are finessed to suit everyone’s preferences, I think.
Dan: That’s very interesting because I notice that the otherness of different faiths within communities is often portrayed by the media to joe-public as “inevitably divisive” rather than something that has happened for centuries mostly in relative harmony. Christopher, tell me about your time living in the UK. What was that like? How did moving to London shape your thoughts on British baking and eating?
Christopher: I lived in London for 11 years total from the age of 13 onwards, which spanned most of my teens and then later my years at uni. My interest in baking was jumpstarted in the early 1980s by a Robert Carrier recipe for dinner rolls in a food mag – I think it was Taste? – which I made over and over again until I got it right. Also, the relative ease (compared to Singapore in the 1980s, anyway) and affordability of getting top-notch dairy products and flours for baking was like a gateway drug. I count myself as very blessed to have experienced the tail-end of the era when milk was still delivered to one’s doorstep in glass bottles, something I’d only previously read about in Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie. I have fond memories of getting gold top as a treat.
The comfort foods that the UK imprinted on me – chief among the baked ones would be mince pies, Cornish pasties, malt granary bread, hot bacon baps for breakfast, custard creams, pork pies, and Eccles cakes. I’m drooling just typing this. I guess I’m just captivated by the taste of good grain and animal fats! That said, the one item I couldn’t and still can’t stomach: soft-textured suet pastry, in steak and kidney pie or anywhere else.
Q: Hehehehe, well it took me a while but I now have a sweet spot for “pudding-textured” pastry. You’ve talked online about cosmopolitan influences on Singaporean baking from the 1970s and ’80s. How do these influences impact your own personal baking style, do you find yourself tweaking family recipes to incorporate flavours from other regions in the world? How do you balance respecting traditional recipes with adapting them for modern tastes or ingredients?
Christopher: I collect cookbooks both vintage and new, so in my reading I’m always running across something new to me. I also run across connections and threads linking countries or histories that I never knew of before, and this makes the world feel smaller, more accessible, more amenable to mashups.
I’ve always loved to freewheel a bit when it comes to trying out new ingredients and new techniques – tradition should be a foundation and a launchpad, not a straitjacket, I feel – but it’s important to consider and respect what centuries of cooks have done before you, before you decide whether to extend a paradigm or to meaningfully break it. To me, as long as a flavour and texture combination makes clear and logical sense in the mouth, then it’s a legal win.
Actually I find that the older I get, the more often I tend to edit and pare back my ideas to showcase just a few flavours, instead of trying to marshal many of them to work together. (Spice pastes for curries and savoury dishes being an exception!)
Dan: That’s a very interesting point about complex spice pastes. I’ve realised that mostly in the west many food writers (me included in the past, I must admit) encourage readers to disdain recipes where there isn’t one clear flavour, a singular hero flavour that is supposedly the point of the dish. And this intolerance of course misses out on the beauty of what I might call “tapestry flavours” like spice pastes that weave and blend many different flavour-ingredients together.
Tell me about your approach to cooking: you’ve in the past described cooking as “effortful” rather than “tedious.” How do you encourage others to embrace this mindset, especially with time-consuming traditional recipes? What do you think we lose when people prioritize convenience over effort in baking?
Christopher: I sometimes go on mini-rants about this when I teach, haha! When people ask me about possible recipe shortcuts for convenience’ sake, I always urge them to make any recipe the full unabridged way at least once, so that in the future if they sacrifice some details, they know exactly the consequences of such. When I teach my own recipes I am careful to explain the reasoning behind every detail, and why it is not arbitrary. Why do I cut the garlic into slivers vs mince? Why do I add the sugar during this step, and not that one? And so on.
Something I see in relation to kueh and many other traditional recipes is that if people never make it themselves, but only buy it, they erroneously conclude (consciously or not) that the shop-bought version is the pinnacle of quality – that that’s the best that dish can possibly get. Whereas in reality, if made at home with love and care, it could be very very much better! I love it when people taste a properly made heritage dish that they’ve only had half-hearted versions of before, and then you see the eureka dawn on their faces, ‘OH, NOW I get it’…
One of the good corollaries of apps like Instagram and Youtube is that home cooks and hawkers and restaurants are all posting behind-the-scenes videos of how things are prepared. Highly edited, to be sure, but it is illuminating for all of us to see just how and why certain techniques are optimal for good results.
Dan: 100%, there’s so much about Instagram and YouTube that has been hugely helpful to me, and I’m sure others. You’ve mentioned parallels between kueh and Western pastries. What do you think Western bakers can learn from Southeast Asian desserts, and vice versa? Why do you think vegetables and non-traditional sweet ingredients are more common in Asian desserts compared to Western ones?
Christopher: For me, one of the most salient differences between Asian approaches and Western approaches is how permeable the boundaries are between what is considered savoury and what is considered sweet. We don’t think ‘oh this is a vegetable, therefore it can’t be in a dessert’, rather we consider how the flavour and texture of that vegetable could be employed in any dish, wherever it may fall in the meal. Of course, historically Western food has had different boundaries in different eras – Italian cuisine has paired eggplant with chocolate, British mince pies used to have meat in them more often than not.
Asian cooks – and perhaps especially Thai and Indonesian cooks – utilise sweet to balance savoury and savoury to balance sweet across and within different courses of a meal. I think of dishes such as Thai khao chae, a summertime collation of different fried and stuffed vegetable, pork and fish tidbits variously seasoned with sugar-cured radish, palm sugar, fish sauce and shrimp paste, and eaten together with rice dressed with cold jasmine-infused water. The whole combination skips between and skirts both sweet and savoury in such a layered and nimble way that it simply cannot be classified according to Western categories like ‘main’, ‘dessert’ or ‘snack’ – quite fascinating and brilliantly so.
Fuchsia Dunlop has written extensively on how Chinese cuisine embraces textures that Western palates find challenging – this is true for desserts as much as for savoury dishes. We love springy, slippery, glutinous textures that one seldom sees further west. But that gap is being closed by contemporary chefs who are exploring these dimensions.
One fruitful cultural exchange I have seen growing in prominence over the years is how cooks in Asia and the West have embraced each other’s fermented foods. Korean kimchi, Japanese miso and Indian pickles are now so popular in the US and UK, and over here in SE Asia cheese has become a common and favourite ingredient in bakeries, as has European-style sourdough.
Dan: SE Asian cheese, now I must get looking for that! What do you think the future of Singaporean food culture looks like in terms of what younger generations will consider their “national baking”?
Christopher: I’m not sure if the younger generations currently have an idea of our ‘national baking’ style, or if they’re aware that there is one. All the latest trendy baked items are imports – thick underbaked cookies, French viennoisserie – even Cedric Grolet has a café here now – Korean desserts, American-influenced waffles and gelato, and such.
In the mid 20th century through the postwar era, the baking taught in Singaporean and Malaysian schools’ home economics classes was heavily Anglo, thanks to the British colonial legacy – cheese straws, rock buns, swiss rolls – and alongside that we had Indonesian-Dutch baking traditions as expressed in the Malay and Peranakan communities. To my mind, it was the mingling of these that gave rise to the repertoires of local bakeries and home cooks that I remember from my youth – curry puffs, chicken pies, pandan chiffon cakes, soft banana cakes made with local banana varieties, red bean paste buns, and so on. In the late 1970s onwards, Hong Kong, Japanese and Taiwanese baking styles entered the picture, with branches of their bakery chains opening outlets here.
Some younger chefs have taken up the baton for this kind of vigorous ‘modern fusion’ baking, so now we have things like tiramisu with taro, black sesame Basque cheesecake, etc. But creations like these have not been around long enough to enter or definitively invigorate the local baking canon, at least to my mind. And not all of their ventures have survived (as in the case of Tiger Lily in Singapore)
So I’m not sure what the future looks like, other than ceaselessly diverse. I can’t say that I see focused movement in any particular direction within that.
Dan: Some people think there’s a growing disconnect between younger generations and their culinary heritage? Do you think this?
Christopher: Yes, I do. I think that nowadays everyone, not just the young, is so overwhelmed by a plethora of food choices and fast-evolving trends that our heads are constantly spinning. In such an environment it can be easy to forget about those things that have persisted for decades and centuries, the food heritage that is the foundation of our relationship with the cultures we each come from.
As for bridging the gap, many senior cooks I’ve talked with have emphasised to me that they were roped in to help in the kitchen when they were very young, and they attributed their interest in food to that early induction into family cooking, even if it may have felt tedious at the time and they’d rather have been outside playing. They also told me that the regular practice of having family dinner and other meals at home together, with everyone seated around the table, also helped to solidify their food heritage for them. I completely agree with this. In comparison, the way we eat today is much more fragmented, with people and kids coming home from work or school at different times, everyone being distracted by their phones, etc. etc. If we place more priority on cooking together and eating together, we stand much more firmly in our personal as well as our community heritage.
Dan: I perhaps agree to some extent about encouraging people to cook and eat together more. I’m not sure entirely sure though. A loss of traditional dishes and the knowledge of how to make them of course leads to many traditional ingredients disappearing from markets. In your view, how can home cooks best adapt recipes while staying true to the spirit of the original dish? And say for problematic ingredients where the production is viewed today as a huge problem for labour (say in the case of cashew nuts), wildlife (palm oil), or the environment (meat and dairy farming), how would you guide people to navigate this when there is often a higher price when you try to buy conscientiously?
Christopher: These situations will become more and more common as the months pass. How I would tackle it myself as a cook is to consider the role of the ingredient in a recipe – is it contributing aroma, acid, richness, umami? – and then see if any alternatives or substitutions could conceivably fill in for it.
When I teach classes, I try to counsel students to not get too stressed about exactly recreating a taste from long ago, because systemic changes to things like agriculture and food processing tech have already altered ingredient flavours from our grandparents’ time.
As for conscientious shopping cooking, the sad truth is that this is much easier if you’re from a higher income bracket – the majority of consumers can’t easily afford organic or fairtrade or responsibly-sourced foods – so the most salient thing we can all do is to educate ourselves and help spread understanding first.
One small slant that I personally try to apply is to seldom or never teach recipes requiring large amounts or large cuts of meat, because eating meat less often and farming it less intensively benefits everyone. Instead, I choose to highlight the ways in which canny applications of vegetables, fruit and spices can enliven cooking.
Dan: Ok, imagine we can snap our fingers and make you king for a day. What changes would you decree for the Singaporean baking culture and the community you see around you?
Christopher: First thing I would do is exhort everyone to ditch unnecessary additives – we can get artificial emulsifiers, flavours and colours easily off the shelf at baking supply stores, many of which were developed for industrial baking and have since trickled down to home bakers. I really abhor these things, which are never needed and have dubious or unknown effects on our health.
The second thing I would probably do – and which in fact I already try to do – is to gently steer bakers away from excessive devotion to fancy imported ingredients – luxury French butter, pricey vanilla, and such, as good as they may be – and towards ingredients from our own region which although native to our cuisines never seem to get as much acclaim or evoke the same amount of interest as the former imports – for example really good coconut milk, really good palm sugar, all the spices and herbs that we have.
Dan: Thank you Christopher! Love all the work you’re doing, this world is a better place for all the thought, effort and talent you’re encouraging.
