It’s a fact of life that it’s the simple things we miss the most. There was a time in my life, for example, for quite a few months, when my definition of heaven was a quiet bedroom to sleep in at night and a hot shower in the morning. I wasn’t worried about a car, or a wine collection, or owning several laptops. Silence and hot water were it for me.
For the past two years, J and I have had a similar need for something basic yet essential. Bread. That’s not to say there isn’t bread in south-east Asia but — damn it all to hell! — 99% of the loaves and rolls you buy here are sweet! There doesn’t seem to be a wheat flour product around that doesn’t have copious amounts of sugar added. (I keep wondering about the level of diabetes in this part of the world. Maybe I’ll follow it up for a later blog.) And so that makes a supper of bread with cheese and fresh tomatoes with herbs a bit difficult. Not to mention to accompany soup. Or with chicken salad. Or even a nice fish curry.
We ordered a 25kg bag of Finnish organic flour from a bakery in Kuala Lumpur last year, but that was expensive, inconvenient to collect and we couldn’t really get the hang of the flour. It had a personality that we somehow couldn’t work with. (Bread-making, as any bread-maker will tell you, is as much art as science.) I mentioned our need to my friend, Parvathy, and she asked whether I’d made enquiries at the spice shop I had visited recently with her mother. Well, to be honest, the woman at the front counter of that shop scared me. To say she was unhelpful to the point of sullen muteness would be an accurate summation of the situation. When I relayed this to Parvathy, she laughed.
“Oh, that’s just the wife,” she told me. “She hates working in the shop.”
“I can tell!”
“The problem is, her husband and both sons work the shop, so she doesn’t really have a choice. The result is, she takes it out on the customers. But you just ignore her, lah, and ask one of the sons. They’re very helpful.”
O-kay. But before I could work up the courage to go back, Parvathy beat me to it and, the next thing I knew, there was a 25kg bag of high-protein flour shedding white powder on the back seat of her car. It seems the shop didn’t do any lesser quantities. After collecting it, J and I stared at the sack with lingering doubt.
“It comes from the Johor Flour Mill in Pasir Gudang,” I told him, having read it off the label.
“Uh huh.”
“At least it’s not Finnish.”
“Uh huh.”
“And it’s not as expensive as the Finnish stuff.”
“Uh huh.”
“Care to make a loaf?”
“I’m … not sure. I think this is something I have to work up to.”
But time was getting away from us and I knew I’d have to make a loaf before Parvathy’s visit, when she was bound to ask how the flour was. So I did. And, gentle reader, the bread came out brilliantly. It rose to the occasion, baked with a lovely medium-brown crust, and smelt divine. There is nothing like the smell of a loaf of bread baking in the oven wafting through your home to make you feel, well, at home.
There’s only one problem. It’s sweet. The damn flour is sweet! Though thankfully not as sweet as the stuff you buy in the shops, which has sweet added to it and is then baked and glazed with sweet before having a decoration of sweet on top. * sigh * So, we have 25kg of (sweet-ish) flour to get through. Oh well, could’ve been worse. Could’ve been Finnish.
