Bread can be a sponge for many things: butter, sauces and moments of global change. We look at how fine-dining chefs are giving life to new ideas with this age-old food in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic
One of Antonio Oviedo's fondest memories of bread is running through the empty cobblestoned streets of his mother's village in the Spanish region of Extremadura, having wrapped up a night of drinking with his friends, honing in on the smell of freshly baked bread at the crack of dawn.
"We used to have this super hot bread straight from the oven—we were burning ourselves. And I remember that, of course, I was, like, 16 or 17 when I started to drink with my friends. Bread, for us, it's something that we grow up with. The first thing that you eat in Spain when you are a kid is bread."
That same bread is served today at Oviedo's Spanish fine-dining restaurant, Agora, nestled within the colonial arches of the Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts. Named candeal after the wheat it's made from, the bread served here is crafted using Oviedo's six-year-old sourdough mother, yielding a clover-shaped loaf with a distinctly dense white interior—a throwback to times when bread was designed to last for several days. Crowning each loaf is an elegantly serifed letter A, another nod to a regional tradition where each family left their own stamp on the bread they baked, all the better to differentiate their own loaves at the communal village oven.
Oviedo is just one of a new crop of chefs rethinking the meaning of bread in a fine-dining setting. Far from the criminally bountiful bread baskets of yore—served at the beginning of a tasting menu and lavishing diners with an abundance of focaccia, breadsticks, croissants, baguettes and brioche à la Joël Robuchon—modern chefs are cutting the fat when it comes to bread, whittling away the superfluous until what is left is a distillation of the restaurant's ethos, serving as a shorthand for the stories behind the cooking.
"Everything is changing because we are more exposed to all the information. I can just Google anything right now and get a recipe for it, so it's more about creating something that really makes sense," explains Oviedo. "My point of view for Agora is to create something unique, something you cannot get that easily: something that represents our culture, that is ancient and unique, rustic but also sophisticated."
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Another peer is Barry Quek, chef-founder of Singaporean restaurant Whey, whose brioche is served with buah keluak emulsion, made from the seed of the kepayang tree native to Malaysia and Indonesia. Resembling a cacao bean, buah keluak imparts nutty and bitter flavours similar to chocolate—although the comparisons end there. When raw, the "black nut" is in fact white and loaded with deadly hydrogen cyanide, and must be treated extensively by boiling and then being buried under ash and earth for 40 days to rid the seeds of their poison. Despite this, buah keluak is widely used in Peranakan dishes like braised meats and curries; though Quek ultimately decided to incorporate the ingredient into his love for baking.
"These days, chefs are realising that making bread is actually quite a craft on its own," says Quek. "There's a lot of time and effort that goes into the bread and where their flour comes from, how they mill it and whether they have a starter or mother that they've kept with them—all this time and effort that goes into the bread is almost as much as what you would spend creating a new dish."
While previously the expertise and dedication required to create a perfect loaf meant that only the most ardent home bakers could commit themselves to the task, the Covid-19 pandemic changed the entire equation. "It's funny because at the moment Covid exploded, I was stuck in Italy, and suddenly flour and any sort of yeast was literally impossible to find," recalls Fabio Bardi, the executive pastry chef at Italian fine-dining restaurant Estro. "Suddenly, I had cousins who had never once cooked in their life attempting to make bread."
With this proliferation of baking knowledge, chefs were suddenly tasked with elevating bread beyond the newly expanded skills of a rapidly growing number of bona fide bakers. Some, like Ricardo Chaneton of Mono, have woven elements of their own experiences into the bread, like his 1,200-day-old sourdough mother. "I always say bread is not a course. To me, bread is a moment," says Chaneton. "I frequently think back to the beginning when we were still building Mono, putting the first brick into the restaurant-and at the same time putting flour, water and a little bit of apple juice into a jar to create our mother dough."
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