My father was skeptical.
And this was fairly new to me. Now, this was a man who had never been stingy with praise for my grades or Chinese brush paintings, which he’d proudly framed and hung in his office when I was a child. And yet, whenever I produced something I’d slaved over for hours in the kitchen during his visits to the United States, he’d chew quietly and say almost nothing. Knowing that he adored chocolate mousse, I once searched online for days for a recipe that had the largest number of positive comments and spent the better part of an afternoon making the mousse just before he arrived in New York. The mousse was met with silence. When I tried out my tau yew bak on him during another dinner in New York, there it was again: silence. (Prompted by Mike’s mmmms and other effusive and overcompensating grunts of enjoyment, however, my father finally said, “The meat was a little tough.”)
It wasn’t that my father thought cooking was a waste of time; he’d given me a lecture in my mid-twenties about my inability to make much besides ramen for dinner, after all. It was just that his mother’s food was seared on his heart; nothing else could possibly come close. (My mother never even tried to impress him in the kitchen, leaving everything up to her maids.) And I knew that, of all the people who would be sampling my attempts at re-creating her dishes over the following year, he would be my toughest critic. I began bracing myself for the silence.
It was May in Singapore—the days were getting more and more fiery as the hot month of June approached. And I was about to learn a rather difficult dish—bak-zhang, the pyramid-shaped dumplings filled with pork and mushrooms and wrapped in bamboo leaves that had been one of Tanglin Ah-Ma’s signature dishes. The dumplings were an annual treat for my family, although they can now be found year-round in Singapore. They’re traditionally eaten in June around the time of the Dumpling Festival, or Duan Wu Jie, which commemorates the death of the Chinese poet and patriot Qu Yuan, who became distraught over the state of his country and committed suicide by throwing himself into a river. When his supporters learned of his death, they threw rice dumplings into the river both as a sacrifice to his spirit and to feed the fish so they wouldn’t nibble on Qu Yuan’s body. Now, every year, Chinese all over the world celebrate the day by eating bak-zhang—which is more commonly known by its Mandarin name, zongzi—and having Dragon Boat races. (Those also stem from Chinese lore. As one story goes, Qu Yuan’s admirers, after learning of his suicide, immediately hopped into boats and paddled out into the river, hoping to rescue him or find his body.)
In my family, store-bought versions of bak-zhang were taboo, of course. The only dumplings that mattered were my Tanglin ah-ma’s. As the years passed and her reputation grew among neighbors, friends, and friends of friends, she began taking orders and selling them. I’d disliked sticky rice as a child and had not really looked forward to eating bak-zhang every year. My father, however, had always adored the dumplings, having grown up eating only the best, of course. “Daddo,” I said to him one day in May. “Auntie Khar Imm is going to teach me how to make Tanglin Ah-Ma’s bak-zhang.” There it was again: silence.
“Oh?” he said after a moment, looking bemused. “Okay.”
The pork was what got me.
By the time I arrived at Auntie Khar Imm’s home in Hougang, a traditional working-class neighborhood in Northern Singapore that has been a Teochew enclave for decades, she’d assembled all the ingredients. Her kitchen was a few times larger than mine in Brooklyn and crammed with appliances, pots, pans, and baskets. This was a kitchen for a serious cook. I had some of the same appliances—the Cuisinart food processor, a large black wok—but mine looked brand-new compared to her weathered pieces. I wondered how many dinners they’d put out. Even though it was mid-morning, the kitchen was fairly dark—being on the third floor of a building surrounded by many other tall apartment towers. What it lacked for in light it had in space, though—enough for two large refrigerators filled with homemade sauces, stews, vegetables, and meats. I imagined both those refrigerators in my own kitchen; there wouldn’t be room for anything else. The garlic cloves and shallots had been set out, and the dried Chinese mushrooms were already soaking in water and were well on their way to softening. As Auntie Khar Imm pulled out the slab of pork belly she’d bought, I couldn’t help but wince. Although I prided myself on trying to be fearless in the kitchen, I had largely stuck to cooking with meat that didn’t resemble an animal in any remote way. I’d make exceptions for fried chicken (my absolute favorite food) and once a year for Thanksgiving, but even then, I delegated any touching of the turkey to the heroic Mike. Generally, I like my meat or fish faceless and in the form of a rectangular slab. All the better if there’s not a whole lot of blood, which gets me to thinking of the animal that once owned that flesh. On Auntie Khar Imm’s kitchen counter, however, lay a large brick of pork belly with a thick layer of fat. And on top of that fat was skin bearing bright pink markings—Chinese characters that had been branded on the poor pig at whatever farm it had spent its relatively short life. I started to feel ill.
I had vowed to be brave, however. Or at least learn how to be brave from my aunties. So I trained my eyes on the pork, readying myself for the inevitable touching. For distraction, I asked what time Tanglin Ah-Ma would typically get up to make bak-zhang. “See how much she is making lor,” Auntie Khar Imm said in Mandarin. “Make more then wake up earlier.” Which made perfect sense, of course. I was reminded of the futility of my pineapple tart interrogations. Perhaps I needed to not focus so much on the specifics of time and quantities. Living in New York, in all the jobs that I had had, I had found it hard not to be consumed with minutiae. When exactly was something supposed to happen? What exactly was to happen? What exactly were the details of Every Single Thing? I always needed to know—for work and also for my own sanity—before embarking on anything. Perhaps this had been the wrong approach to cooking all along. Perhaps it was time to start letting go.
With this new determination, the reformed, loosey-goosey me bellied up to the counter, ready to help. At first, this involved a great deal of watching. I watched Auntie Khar Imm mince the garlic cloves. I watched her dice the softened mushrooms. I watched her run the shallots through a food processor. Then I watched her bring a pot of water to boil, placing the pork belly and chunk of pork leg into the water for a quick boiling. After a few minutes, she whipped out a sharp chopstick and gestured for me to look as she jabbed it into the pork to see if it was cooked enough. “If it can go through easily, it’s done,” she said. I’d always wondered how seasoned cooks gauged how meat was done. In my own kitchen, my eagle-eyed staring at a grilling pork chop or simmering chicken never seemed to work out quite right. As I’d watch my guests start eating, I was never able to shake the feeling that, somehow, my meat had ended up overcooked or undercooked. (Eventually, I started delegating the monitoring of meat doneness to Mike—I just couldn’t handle the stress.)
“You don’t want it fully cooked,” Auntie Khar Imm warned, as she carefully hoisted the pork slabs out of the newly cloudy water. “You just want it cooked enough so it makes it easier to chop.” As I watched her chop up the pork belly with grace and ease, it looked simple. So I volunteered to take over and do the rest. Of course, the moment she handed the knife to me, chopping turned out to be anything but easy. Between wrestling with the squishy and slightly slimy pork belly while trying to angle the slender knife to slice the meat and worrying about using too much force and sending the round wooden chopping board flying off the counter, I was managing to cut up about five little cubes of pork a minute. (Or so it felt.) Auntie Khar Imm didn’t say anything. I didn’t dare look up to meet her eyes. If I had wondered before whether she doubted that I’d ever actually cooked anything in my life, I was pretty sure this display was confirming it all. Patiently, however, she watched. And slowly, I plodded, dicing and slicing until an eternity had passed and a mound of cubed meat lay before me. I’m convinced that process took about three hours—but I was feeling good about my meat. In fact, I was so pleased with myself that I stopped to take a picture.
Next, Auntie Khar Imm grabbed a massive bottle of cooking oil and turned it over, sending large ribbons of yellow into a large wok. I called out, asking her to stop and tell me how much oil she was putting in. And once again, the a words tumbled out. “Aiyah, agak-agak lah!” she said. “If you use more garlic, then you use more oil.” Which, of course, made perfect sense. Sort of. Until I started to think But how much garlic should I be using? Is ten cloves enough? Not enough? I was still determined to learn how to make the perfect bak-zhang, and my head was nearly exploding from trying to conjure precision from the imprecise. I reminded myself to breathe and let go. But not before staring really hard at the oil in the wok and thinking that the amount looked an awful lot like about a quarter of a cup. Slowly, it seemed, I was learning to agak-agak.
Auntie Khar Imm heated the oil and tossed in the minced garlic, gently frying up the sputtering mixture. “You want it to be slightly brown but not too brown or it will be bitter,” she said, slowly stirring. When the garlic turned gold, she carefully removed it from the wok, placing it in a bowl. Next, she fried up the shallots in the same oil, adding some more oil—as I watched closely, trying to agak-agak along with Auntie Khar Imm—then removed them. Next, the mushrooms went into the oil for about ten minutes of frying. I may not have been measuring out the amounts, but I was studiously watching the clock and scribbling down starting and ending times. Auntie Khar Imm clucked, however, and firmly instructed me to make sure to look into the wok. “You want to fry until the mushrooms are soft and all the water that comes out of them has disappeared,” she said. Next, my wonderfully diced pork went in, then the garlic, shallots, some sugar, white pepper, ground coriander, and dark soy sauce, a sweet and thick mixture that looks like molasses and is common in Singaporean Chinese dishes. With the wok almost full now, Auntie Khar Imm summoned up more strength as she fried, swirling the ingredients about the pan as I watched. Finally, she paused to taste a spoonful of the mixture before dumping in more white pepper and sugar. And with just a few more firm stirs, we were done.
The filling looked lovely—it was the shade of bittersweet chocolate and smelled peppery, garlicky, and porky all at once.
The meat would cool overnight; the next day, dumpling wrapping would begin.
The wrapping phase of bak-zhang making is time-consuming. For starters, you need to soak the uncooked glutinous rice in cool water for at least five hours. You also need to soak the dried bamboo leaves in water so they’re malleable enough for wrapping.
I would be lying if I said I actually did any of this—Auntie Khar Imm woke up at 4:30 A.M. to get all this done before I showed up, mired in a fog of sleepiness, at the (to me) early hour of 10:00 A.M. In fact, by the time I arrived that next morning, Auntie Khar Imm had not only done all of this but had also already set up our bak-zhang wrapping station. A long pole was propped horizontally; she had tied two clusters of strings to the pole and arranged a carpet of newspapers beneath it.
I suddenly got the sense that the Ghirardelli chocolates I had brought her the day before were a woefully inadequate gift.
Pulling up two squat wooden stools, Auntie Khar Imm gestured for me to sit. Grabbing a handful of long leaves, she showed me the drill. First, she took two long bamboo leaves and lined them up horizontally. Then she bent them in the middle and twisted one side upward so both ends were pointing north and a triangular hollow had formed at the base. Next, she scooped a tablespoon or two of rice into the hollow and topped that with a layer of the pork filling. Then she filled the rest of the hollow with more rice, patted it down as firmly as she could, grabbed the bottom of the pyramid with one hand, and used her other hand to fold over the leaves so they covered the rice. Finally, she wrapped some string very tightly around the perfect green pyramid and tied a knot to keep everything in place. This entire process took Auntie Khar Imm seconds to do. And then it was my turn.
Now, when I was growing up, origami had its minor moment among elementary school girls in Singapore. Oh, how we would save up our allowances, buy neat little packages of brightly colored square paper imported from Japan, and after consulting a compendium of picture-filled origami books, we’d while away time at home, in school, fashioning frogs, cranes, and intricate little balls that you could actually blow up—and throw at other girls. Well, when I say we, actually, I don’t mean me. I was absolutely ungifted at this paper-folding business. I tried, yes, but cranes, frogs, and (as desperately as I wished to be making them) those tiny paper-ball weapons were completely beyond me. I should have known that I would not be what they call a natural at this bak-zhang wrapping deal.
The lining up and folding to create the hollow were mystifying to me. After a few tries, some with Auntie Khar Imm guiding my hands, however, I began to get the hang of it. Holding on to the leaves tight enough and piling on the rice proved a little tricky, though. Clumps of meat and bits of rice rained on my toes and skittered across the newspapers. And no matter how hard I tried, my dumplings looked more like puffy green breast implants than the perfect pyramids Auntie Khar Imm kept making. Probably sensing how mortified I was over my clumsiness, my auntie never said an unkind word. “This is your first time making them,” she kept saying. “Don’t worry.” She did, however, have an issue with my method of packing. “Mai ah-neh giam siap lah!” she said, over and over, when she saw how little pork I was putting into each dumpling. Don’t be so stingy. She was piling four to five heaping tablespoons of filling into each dumpling. I, on the other hand, was putting in two to three. I realized that after all the effort we—well, Auntie Khar Imm—had put into chopping and frying, I was subconsciously rationing our precious, precious pork. “You want to have a bit of the meat with every bite,” she explained. “That’s what will make it tasty.” Try as I might, however, I couldn’t bring myself to stop being giam siap. We’d slaved over this pork—if only people knew! They would be lucky to eat this. They should be allowed to appreciate it only in small doses! Like caviar. Or truffles!
And this was how we ended up, two hours and forty-two bak-zhangs later, faced with a large bowl of pork filling long after the rice had run out. I wasn’t sure what to say. “Oops” didn’t quite seem to cut it. Auntie Khar Imm looked disappointed. “Well, we can eat this with rice,” she said, packing up the pork.
As I’d wrapped the last of my verdant breast implants, Auntie Khar Imm had set a massive pot of water on the stove to boil, tossing in ten knotted pandan leaves. Carefully, she unhooked the clusters of bak-zhang from the pole and immersed them in the water. The dumplings would have to boil for ninety minutes. I looked around the kitchen, the apartment, and wondered, What would we do for ninety minutes? Things were going swimmingly when we had tasks at hand; the concentration I needed to focus on chopping, wrapping, and not pelting myself with pork had greatly limited the idle time we had for conversation. With ninety minutes to kill, however, I wondered what we’d have to say to each other. I needn’t have worried.
“When Ah-Ma died, it was very tragic,” Auntie Khar Imm began, speaking of Tanglin Ah-Ma, my paternal grandmother. “I didn’t really know how to cook. Everything I made, your uncle Soo Kiat said, ‘You don’t know how to cook. My mother’s food is so much better.’ ” I was surprised—having remembered great dishes that my auntie Khar Imm had made and set out at Chinese New Years past—but I understood perfectly. Decades after her death, my father continued to feel the same fervor about his mother’s cooking. “Wo liu yenlei ah,” Auntie Khar Imm said. I wasn’t sure how to respond—the thought of my auntie crying because the food she made for her family didn’t match up to my grandmother’s was hard to bear.
My grandmother had shouldered the brunt of the daily cooking, Auntie Khar Imm said, because my auntie had been busy with work and then her two children. She’d helped and watched, sure, but when it came to actually being the mistress of the kitchen, the job was intimidating. “So how did you learn?” I asked. Remembering my Tanglin ah-ma’s methods and practice, she said. “And I used to go downstairs and listen to the san gu liu po [gossipy aunties],” she added in Mandarin. “Whatever they said about cooking, I would listen, and then I would come home and try it out.” And bit by bit, the complaints began disappearing.
Auntie Khar Imm may have silenced her critics, but I knew my toughest one was still waiting to be convinced. I didn’t want to watch my father eat one of my bak-zhang, and I was grateful that he ate one while I wasn’t at breakfast one morning. Not that he said anything all day about it, of course. My mother had to tell me that he’d finally tried it.
“Well?” I asked my father, hoping against hope. There was a brief silence, and then “You must tell Auntie Khar Imm that her bak-zhang standard has dropped.” I was confused. It had tasted perfectly good to me. I couldn’t fathom what could possibly have been wrong with those dumplings—apart from the fact that the ones I’d made were entirely the wrong shape. And tiny. And had too little pork. And may have come apart because I didn’t tie them up well enough. But apart from all that, I thought our bak-zhang was fantastic! I started to feel indignant. These Tan men. Would there ever be any way to please them?
“The meat,” he finally said. “The chunks are just too big.”
And there it was. The one thing I’d volunteered to do was the very thing that had brought down the mighty bak-zhang that Auntie Khar Imm and I had slaved over for two days. I immediately confessed that it was my fault; he looked unsurprised.
This “learning to be a Tan woman” quest was starting to look a little bleak.
During my weeks in Singapore, I began to feel a gaping hole in my heart that only something back in New York could fill.
Just the thought of him would get me itchy—and oh, how I pined. My hands would tremble, my heart would quicken. I spent days thinking about the things I would do with him the moment I got back. I half envisioned our reunion involving a slow-motion running scene, arms outstretched, hair flying in the breeze, my cheeks flushed in anticipation of hand to steel.
Mike understands fully that this object of my pining is not him. It’s my oven that I crave—my sturdy little hunk of stainless steel, which has seen me through countless cookies, cakes, and pies in our little Brooklyn home. My mother’s Singapore kitchen had no oven to speak of, and in my weeks away from New York, I realized just how much I missed feeling dough between my fingers, the smell of a summer crisp bubbling as it baked. This time, when I arrived back in New York, after a hot and steamy reunion with my oven, I was sated, but still, I wanted more. It was in this fog of longing that it struck me: I am going to conquer bread.
A few summers before, I’d vowed to conquer pies. Over three months, I spent days and nights in my sweltering kitchen mixing, wrestling with dough, peeling and slicing apples, pears, and nectarines, and carefully crimping my way through pie after pie. After finally discovering the wonder of rolling out dough between two sheets of wax paper to achieve a perfect (and easily transferable) crust, I considered pies conquered. Ditto with rhubarb the following summer, when I spent weekend after weekend churning out rhubarb pies, cakes, and crisps. And then there was the summer that I devoted myself to fried chicken. You do not want to know about the extra swath of flesh that appeared around my waist right about then.
Bread, however, had been a force of nature I’d never even contemplated taking on. Yeast? Rising? Kneading? I had absolutely no idea how it all worked. The notion of trying to bake bread was all the more absurd considering that I’d taken cues from the fashion conscious in New York and had all but sworn off eating bread—unless I was in Paris and unless it was amazing bread, that is. And then one day, Nicole, an amateur baker in San Diego, sent out a message on Twitter: “I need a challenge. Am thinking of baking my way through every single recipe in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. Anyone want to join me?” A challenge. I was instantly intrigued.
I was beginning to feel the tiniest sprouts of confidence in the kitchen, after having learned pineapple tarts among other lessons from my aunties. And so I signed on, sending away for the bread guru Peter Reinhart’s book The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, a bread-baking bible of sorts. Before long, I was joining more than two hundred bakers across the United States and in locales as far-flung as Berlin and Sri Lanka in this quest to master the art of baking bread. The bakers, male and female, included Internet administrators, stay-at-home moms, an architect, an epidemiologist. The woman from Sri Lanka was a science fiction writer who had moved there from the United States in pursuit of love. (It appeared to be going well.) At the heart of it all was Nicole, an avid baker who flung herself into kitchen projects and blogged about them at www.pinchmysalt.com to get her mind off her husband, who was deployed in Iraq. “This was something for me to jump into to keep me busy,” she said. And her deal was simple: Every week, we would all bake a bread in the book. Because the bakers were scattered across the continents, there was no way for us to meet and break our homemade breads. So each of us would simply post an account of baking that week’s bread on our own blog. It sounded easy enough. I decided to throw my spatula into the ring (at least during the weeks that I didn’t spend in my aunties’ kitchens in Singapore).
My first bread was a little redundant for a New Yorker: bagels. Since I live in bagel central, however, I assumed this would be an easy first—something that I, with my newfound confidence in the kitchen, could ace. What could be difficult? A lot, it turned out.
For starters, it was impossible to find high-gluten flour, the ingredient that’s essential to making bagels chewy. I called a phalanx of stores that sell hard-to-find ingredients. Nothing. After a day of searching, it became rather ludicrous, given that you can buy bagels on virtually every city block in New York.
I started tearing my hair out; people began questioning the sanity of my quest. “Aiyoh, why did you sign up for something like that?” Simpson, a New York chef friend, said. “Some more, bagels are so cheap!” With my bread-baking deadline looming, my local bagel shop, Montague Street Bagels, galloped to the rescue. After I explained my troubles to the owner with a great deal of whining and gigantic, sad-looking eyes, he disappeared into his kitchen and emerged with a bag of high-gluten flour.
“What else are you going to put in?” he asked, wincing when I mentioned malt syrup and powder. “That’s going to give it a bitter taste!” he said, disappearing once again and returning with a little paper bag of brown sugar and very stern instructions to “use this instead.” Given that he makes and sells more than two hundred bagels a day using an old family recipe—and that he was now my high-gluten hero—I figured I should listen to him.
Back in my kitchen, I mixed yeast with high-gluten flour and let it sit for two hours to rise. Then I added salt, brown sugar, more instant yeast, and a few more cups of high-gluten flour and really stirred the mix up. This dough was nothing like anything I’d handled before—this was one stiff ball of ectoplasmic stickiness. I began to understand how victims in aliens movies felt. Then came the kneading—which was supposed to last for ten minutes in order to pass the “windowpane test,” in which the dough is so elastic that you can stretch it out to form a semi-sheer “window.”
I kneaded. And kneaded. And kneaded. My hands, my arms, my elbows hurt. There was sweat on my brow. I began to think that, even though Michelle Obama has said, “You know, cooking isn’t one of my huge things,” she might change her mind if she realized how much it could help keep those toned arms of hers in shape. Who needs a gym when you can bake bagels?
After thirty minutes of pressing and pummeling, when the dough felt plenty stretchy even without any windowpaning, I made the executive decision to listen to my aching arms and stop. I rolled up the dough into ten little balls, guesstimating that each one was the 4.5 ounces it was supposed to be. After covering them with a damp towel and letting them rest for twenty minutes, I formed them into bagels by poking holes in the centers and stretching out those holes. Then they sat for twenty minutes at room temperature before going into the fridge to “rest” overnight.
During that time, I made an important discovery. When it comes to baking, guesstimation would be a don’t.
Comparing notes with Nicole, the San Diego baker who had started it all, and other Bread Baker’s Apprentice challenge bakers on Twitter, I realized that I was supposed to have twelve bagels, not ten. My bagels looked enormous, but it was too late—my bagels had been made. And I had to sleep in them. (Or something like that.) Besides, Mike, a great lover of all breads, had been growing more excited by the hour about homemade bagels for brunch. The next morning, even before his eyes were open, he mumbled, “Don’t you have bagels to be making?”
And so the boiling began. I put them in boiling water for five minutes on each side, and then they were ready for coating. After kicking myself for throwing out the last of the Japanese crushed seaweed, sesame seed, and sea salt mix that I sometimes use on rice, I tossed together some minced garlic, sesame seeds, and poppy seeds. And finally, after two days and two sore arms, the bagels went into the oven. I was edgy with anticipation. (And Mike was edgy with an ever-growing hunger.)
The end result was lovely. I’d never eaten a bagel fresh out of the oven before. The middles were soft and chewy, and they had a lightly sweet taste that made them better than versions I’d bought in stores. When I’d decided to make bagels, even I had questioned the silliness of it. I rarely eat bagels myself—and what would be the point of learning to make something that I probably would never make again?
Watching Mike attack my bagel, however, I began to understand. And when he asked for seconds and then contemplated thirds, the purpose of this endeavor—and of this modern wifery in the kitchen at all—started to dawn on me. In fact, I started to wonder what I had been waiting for all these years.
The next time I return from Bergdorf Goodman with another “sorry honey I just couldn’t resist them” pair of Christian Louboutins, I’m making bagels.