BTO: Glad to be green

Business Times - 28 Mar 2009

Glad to be green

To mark Earth Hour, which is being observed around the world today, we catch up with three individuals who are hoping to make a difference with their sustainable, eco-friendly food businesses

 

The Organic Baker
(www.theorganicbaker.com)
Tel 6749-9077

 

THOUSANDS of years before instant yeast liberated many an amateur baker, ancient Egyptians would mix grains and water and let the mixture ferment naturally, before using the resulting culture to create the world's oldest leavened bread - sourdough.

 

Industrialisation and the fast-food culture would have turned this ancient art of breadmaking into a footnote in a textbook on food history if not for a growing number of artisanal bakers around the world determined to keep the tradition alive. Bakers like Grace Chia, a white bread-eating Singaporean who had an epiphany almost 10 years ago as an undergraduate in Melbourne, and hasn't looked at a loaf of Gardenia since.

 

The mechanical engineering graduate returned to Singapore with a passion for breadmaking that continued even when she went to work as a project manager for a construction company. But after six years of that, she quit her job to open The Organic Baker last September, possibly Singapore's first artisanal bakery focusing entirely on organic sourdough.

 

Together with her fiance and one baker, the 30-year-old Chia churns out 200 to 300 loaves of white, multigrain, wholewheat, rye and fruit sourdough a week from her tiny premises in Kaki Bukit, sold through various organic shops.

 

'The nature of sourdough is such that the ingredients used have to be as pure as possible, which is why we only use organic flour, fruit and grains,' she explains. 'It really does have an effect on the flavour.'

 

While 'hardcore' sourdough - especially the German variety - can have a very strong tangy aroma and heavy texture, Chia's sourdough is milder, with a pleasing flavour and nicely dense and chewy texture. The bread needs to be toasted before eating, as it can be a little hard and dry when cold, like a bagel. But it doesn't mean that it's not fresh, that's just the way sourdough is. Spongier alternatives may have artificial 'boosters' to make it softer, whereas The Organic Baker uses flour, water, a bit of salt and that's it.

 

Everything is baked as traditionally as possible, says Chia, so much so that a mixer and oven are the only equipment she has in her bakery. It's a philosophy she picked up from her training stints in Australia, where she would take leave from her day job to work in a tiny bakery in a small town called Berry, just outside Sydney, which baked its bread in wood-burning ovens.

 

'I lived on soft bread all my life,' says Chia, 'and it was never about sitting down and enjoying it. But in Melbourne where I was studying, I lived near a market and I would buy a loaf on weekends and think, 'how can bread taste so good?' - there was a whole different culture about it.'

 

It's something that Singaporeans are starting to appreciate too, considering that sales are starting to pick up and even organic shops located in the heartlands are selling her bread.

They've also made adjustments to their recipe to accommodate the local palate, hence the lighter, not-so-heavy texture of their breads. 'Before we started the bakery, we would bake at home and give the bread away and got feedback like 'too hard', 'too sour', etc and we made adjustments,' says Chia. 'We also recently expanded our range to include softer white sourdough.'

 

While she's targetting niche retailers now, the long-term plan is to sell through large supermarket chains. But the commitment to natural ingredients and baking processes remain. Even the plastic packaging is eco-friendly. And perhaps of more importance to those with a taste for home baked goodness, they now have a new addition to their bread basket.

 

Spruce
320 Tanglin Road
Tel 6836-5528

 

SPACE in Singapore isn't cheap, which is why you won't find many eateries devoting large chunks of their premises to concepts that don't translate directly into covers. But one standout in that regard is Spruce: about a fifth of the two-week-old restaurant's sprawling grounds are dedicated to carefully-tended gardens of herbs and vegetables such as mint, basil, rosemary, lavender, tomatoes, broccoli, long beans and lemongrass. There's also a wine and cheese 'cave' on-site.

 

Spruce's co-owner and chef Travis Masiero feels that these facilities - all of which are open to diners' exploration - are a vital contribution to the establishment in that they serve as educational tools. Explains the American: 'Growing food is a big passion of mine and the gardens provide a connection to the cooking that we do. They give our guests something to talk about and, more so, give experience to our staff in that they can see how something grows.

 

'We want to help people understand that food is not something that comes in a plastic bag; you need to take care of it when it comes out of the earth so that you can respect it.'

 

Of course, the local climate and space do not allow for the majority of Spruce's produce to be grown on-site, so the restaurant works in partnership with Grace Cup, a small Cameron Highlands company that specialises in growing Japanese produce such as momotaro tomatoes, to get the bulk of its greens (for meat, Spruce uses USDA Prime for its steaks and Australian angus in its burgers). On the restaurant's part, this means drawing an understanding with Grace Cup to ensure that land is used but not killed by 'respecting it and understanding how the eco system works', and that the use of fertilisers and pesticides are avoided as far as possible. This, in turn, results in the restaurant getting the best food possible. 'They don't send us things that they shouldn't, and we get our vegetables not 24 hours after they were picked from the ground,' says Masiero.

 

If you find the chef's name familiar, it's because he used to head the kitchen at the Riverside Point bistro Wine Garage. When his contract there ended last October, Masiero decided to follow his dream of opening his own restaurant, and teamed up with another food aficionado, former Hewlett-Packard engineer Danny Pang, to do so.

 

The result is Spruce, located on a hilly rise where the old Ministry of Home Affairs complex at Phoenix Park once was. Green gardens aside, the restaurant is outfitted in lots of rich brown wood and vintage-y fabrics. Pendant lamps that look as if they could be amorphous alien larvae radiate a soft glow over the space, and if you sit out on the al fresco terrace, there's an out-in-the-woods feel that could prompt some to call this the new Dempsey. Except that it will never grow to such chaotic proportions: Spruce will apparently be the only restaurant within the complex.

 

Such exclusivity is all the better to showcase the restaurant's range of fresh, uncomplicated fare, or 'great simple food that's acceptable for everybody' as Masiero describes it. On the menu are dishes such as salads, pastas, burgers, steak and roast chicken (priced between $9 and $29) for lunch and dinner, along with a fabulous breakfast list full of happy food such as freshly-baked breads, farm eggs with house-cured bacon and caviar, and hot corn waffles.

 

'It's a limited selection of very high quality food but with a certain comfort level,' acknowledges the chef. 'We don't have things that people haven't seen or tasted before; a lot of what we have is very common, like burgers, pasta, fish and chips. But what we want is for people to go away saying things like 'that's the best burger' or 'that's the best fish and chips I've ever had'.'

 

Perhaps the menu offering that says the most about Spruce and its philosophy, though, are the oysters, which Masiero loves. The restaurant gets them from Canada, Australia and France - 'wherever where they're in season' - twice a week on Tuesdays and Fridays. 'Oysters are like the perfect food,' says the chef. 'They're an indication of freshness and you can't mess them up too much. It's simple food right from the ocean.'

Fresh from the mountains

Organic Himalayan produce
( cynthiahoefer@mac.com)

 

CYNTHIA Wee-Hoefer and her husband, Hans, is right in front of the 'plant your own vegetables' movement. But instead of a vegetable patch in their garden, the plot is 3,500 km away and about 1,800m high in the Himalayan mountains.

 

The couple's intention to grow their own organic vegetables took a long time before it bore fruit, so to speak - more than 10 years in fact.

 

'When we first bought the farm in Nepal, the intention was to grow our own vegetables, and turn it into a holiday villa as well,' explains Ms Wee-Hoefer, a former journalist. That was back in 1996, in a place called Phulbari.

 

But the time the Hoefers bought the farm was also the time of the Maoist insurgency, which took about a decade to run its course. And during that time, the Hoefers didn't do much with the property.

 

If the name Hoefer doesn't ring a bell, Insight Guides might. The series was started by the German in the 1970s, after his first guidebook on Bali in 1970, and grew into one of the biggest companies in travel publishing, selling over 20 million copies on over 125 destinations. It is also the only guidebook series available in 10 languages.

 

The Maoists laid down their arms in a ceasefire in 2006, however, and the Hoefers quickly returned to Nepal to start a planting programme. 'First we allowed the farm to be used as a training ground for permaculture farming by a non-governmental organisation,' says Ms Wee-Hoefer. Permaculture farming is a concept started by an Australian, which aims to create human settlements and perennial agricultural systems that mimic the relationships found in natural ecologies.

 

While that programme didn't work out, the vegetables that the Hoefers and some local farmers managed to plant finally yielded a harvest last March.

 

'And what that meant was that we had to find a market for them!' she says. The first shipment to Singapore consisted of about 100kg of potatoes, tomatoes, carrots and other produce, and since then the vegetables are being flown in more regularly, about once a fortnight, and are sold out of the Hoefers' home atop Bukit Batok Nature Park - based on emails that she sends out.

 

Last week's shipment consisted mainly of European salad greens. The seeds are sourced by Ms Wee-Hoefer from countries like Austria and Italy. They include Swiss chard and Italian radicchio, endives and chicory, rucola, New Zealand spinach besides Nepali potatoes, garlic and onions.

 

'Just the fact that these are vegetables grown in the highlands sets them apart from other types of vegetables you can get locally,' she points out, adding that you can really taste how different and fresh her Himalayan-grown vegetables are.

 

Nepali potatoes are different from the ones grown in Brastagi, Medan, for example, or America or Australia. Italian tomatoes grown on the farm are also vine-ripened, which accounts for their sweetness. And recently, the farm started pressing its own sunflower and soybean oils.

 

Eco-living is practically a given in Nepal, given frequent electricity cuts of up to 13 hours a day sometimes. So animal dung is converted to bio-gas for kitchen use, while kitchen waste is made into compost. Chickens provide eggs and buffaloes, milk is made into yoghurt or mozzarella cheese.

 

As for the carbon miles it takes to fly these vegetables in twice a month or so, Ms Wee-Hoefer points out that more than 80, if not 90, per cent of Singapore's produce is imported anyway, and since there's a daily Silkair flight from Nepal to Singapore, they're just making use of the freight space.

 

There is a future in organic vegetables, she strongly believes. And the ones that she grows also taste quite different, because they're grown at a high elevation. So far, she's received very encouraging feedback about her vegetables, with customers saying how fresh and delicious they are, and that they especially like knowing where the produce come from.

 

Where cost is concerned, Ms Wee-Hoefer is also quite confident that her prices are comparable if not cheaper than even some non-organic produce. Her rucola is priced between $25 and $28 per kg, while it's $40 and more at Cold Storage. Her potatoes are $10 per kg compared to $19 per kg French potatoes, while her fresh rosemary at $110-$124 per kg is way below the prices of the hydroponically-grown version.

 

In fact, if you want a Himalayan farm stay, the Hoefers do receive paying guests at their lodge (from $50 per person per day, full board once you get there) and you probably won't have to ask twice if you want to try a spot of farming as well.

Guilt-free pleasures

A meatless restaurant, low-carb pizza and sugar-free chocolates - things are looking up for all those with a less-is-more approach to food

 

Naive
99 East Coast Road
Tel 6348-0668
www.naivecompany.com

 

PHYLLIS Ong, co-owner of Naive, remembers how three men stopped outside her restaurant one day and started looking through the menu as they pondered whether to eat there or not.

 

'There's nothing on the menu to say that the restaurant doesn't serve meat, so you could see them flipping the pages faster and faster like, 'oh my goodness, where's the meat?' ' she laughingly recalls. 'We told them we were a meatless restaurant and they panicked. They refused to come in saying, 'no, no, we're carnivores!' But we managed to persuade them to come in and within two weeks they came back three times!'

 

That's just the kind of reaction that Ms Ong - a vegetarian for health reasons - wants to get with this one-and-a-half- month-old eatery in Katong. 'It's a restaurant first, and meatless second.' After all, mention vegetarian and people tend to immediately think of gluten and self-deprivation, but Ms Ong wants diners to think of Naive as a place that serves good food that is also healthy and doesn't appeal only to vegetarians.

 

The formula seems to be working, especially as the restaurant does brisk business, and 90 per cent of customers are not vegetarian, she adds.

 

The food at Naive is Asian-influenced and relies a lot on the use of monkeyhead mushrooms - which has a versatile texture that can taste almost uncannily like meat braised in myriad sauces and spices. Tofu also appears on the menu as a special tofu and seaweed cake, looking almost like a vegetarian ngoh hiang (liver roll).

 

The challenge, says Ms Ong, was to develop a plant-based menu with no meat, seafood, eggs, onion or garlic that anyone with any kind of food restriction (or not) could eat with no problem. Finding chefs was another problem and she even had a chef who quit after one day. But Ms Ong - who also runs a more traditional vegetarian restaurant called Whole Earth - managed to recruit a few former chefs (who couldn't quite get used to cooking meat in a regular kitchen) who were happy to come back.

 

'Our kitchen is non-violent,' quips Ms Ong, and not cooking meat seems to have eased the temper of one hot-headed chef. 'He's still got a bad temper, but it's not as bad now.'

 

Taste-wise, the food at Naive manages to coax much flavour from the mushrooms although the downside is that they are more often than not deep-fried first so they have a better texture and can soak up the braising liquid for more flavour. The tofu cake, tasty as it is, is also deep-fried, while the fried olive rice again takes up more oil than is perhaps necessary. But there are other non-oily dishes like flavourful soups, congee and some of the other beancurd dishes.

 

Still, the restaurant's good intentions extend to its 'bloss' ceremony - a non-religious rite where you are presented with toasted sesame seeds in a mortar and pestle which you grind to release its fragrance as well as to give thanks to the many blessings (as represented by the seeds) in your life. With its affordable pricing and pleasant (if harried) staff, eating at Naive can be a pretty smart move.

 

DeSte
20 Upper Circular Road
The Riverwalk #01-39/41
Tel 6536-1556

 

IT USED to be pretty darn difficult to make a decent gift of locally available, sugar-free chocolates. Until last month, all that was on the table were cardboard-wrapped bars of the supermarket variety, or raisinettes unglamorously packaged in clear cellophane bags topped off with a twistie. Then there was the issue of flavour. Most of these sugar-free varieties tasted flat and lacked the kick of real sugar.

 

But then somebody noticed - and, luckily for those battling a sweet tooth, that somebody is a pastry expert who decided to do something about it. DeSte chef Stefano Deuiri wanted to create quality sweets for a good friend of his who is diabetic, so he spent months experimenting with different techniques to come up with new methods of producing filled chocolates without using sugar.

 

The result is an innovative line of sugar-free chocolate pralines, launched a month ago, that the chef believes is a first for Singapore (a range of sugar-free chocolate bars is in the works). 'Pralines are made from caramel and it is near impossible to make caramel without using sugar,' he says. 'But I have found a method that allows me to do that. I believe what I'm doing now is the first of its kind here; maybe even in the world.'

 

There are eight varieties of Deuiri's sugar-free pretty pralines, which are priced at $29.80 for an equally gorgeous gold-and-black box of eight. Flavours range from a crunchy Red Fruit Salad made of tangy berries enrobed in milk chocolate, to an aromatic Coffee Ganache with whisky-laced caramel in dark chocolate.

 

Even DeSte's signature recipe is now available to diabetics and the health conscious: the White Chocolate Mint Rock is made of the patisserie's unique rock chocolate that's injected with air so it collapses in little puffs when left on the tongue to melt. But the best part is that you can't really taste that these treats aren't the real McCoy - they're rich and quite chocolatey without that flat, sweetish aftertaste brought on by artificial sweeteners.

 

With one in 10 Singaporeans afflicted by diabetes and more who want to cut down on their sugar intake for other health reasons, Deuiri feels it's high time such a range of quality sugar-free chocolates was launched.

 

'I want to offer an alternative product for these people so that they can still enjoy chocolates despite the limitations,' he says. He adds with satisfaction: 'When my diabetic friend tried them, he hugged and thanked me. He said he hadn't been able to taste such good pralines for such a long time.'

 

Barracks
8D Dempsey Road
Tel 6476-6050

 

Skinny Pizza
3 Temasek Boulevard
#01-002 Suntec City Galleria
Tel 6333-9774

 

PEOPLE generally like pizza, but some of them don't really want the carbs that come with the crust. So the good people at Spa Esprit Group decided to come up with a healthier version of pizza.

 

Enter the Skinny Pizza - a pizza with a thin crust. But this isn't just a thin-crust pizza. The twist is that there's crackle to it, as it's more like crispy bread. 'I personally dislike doughy pizza with melted cheese,' says Cynthia Chua, managing director of the group.

 

Inspired by the local paper prata, the Skinny Pizza was finally created, with a thin crispy base topped with fresh greens and fillings, much like a salad.

 

It's fair to call the Skinny Pizza a hearty salad, in fact, with its abundance of rucola leaves or fresh roasted vegetables piled on top of a crisp.

 

While there are toppings like chorizo and roasted pumpkin, mixed with healthy nuts like almonds and macadamia, 'luxe' pizzas also feature squid ink and truffles. The Truffle Mushroom Pizza comes with roasted mushrooms and garlic and is drizzled over with white truffle oil, and the Squid Ink Pizza has freshly grilled calamari and prawns atop a squid ink pizza base.

 

Another culinary point to note is that tomato puree is replaced with tangy roasted fresh tomatoes, while fresh cheese is scattered or shaved fresh onto the pizza.

 

Spa Esprit used to operate a soup place at its Suntec City outlet, but that was perhaps a tad too 'healthy'. Pizza, however, is something everyone is familiar with, and this salad-rich version should really tug at the conscientious eater's palate.