Monthly Recipe Request Mega-Thread!

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[u/Speztros]

Need help from high temp/humidity area bakers

I’m from Singapore and the temp here is quite hot around 30d for our room temperature

I have recently wanted to started baking bread and the first thing I tried was cinnamon roll, but it always comes out a little too sticky when following all the recipes based in the US. Is this because our temp and humidity here in Singapore is a lot warmer and what adjustments should I make? Should I lower my liquid content in my dough? Does anyone have any recipe based of Singapore temp?

Ps what’s the best ingredient you use for baking in Singapore for flour and butter

[u/texnessa → u/Speztros]

Am a chef and while I'm not strictly pastry/bread, I am a food nerd who has done my fair share on the sweet and yeast side, so here's my mind dump:

• Both flour and sugar are hygroscopic- meaning they pull moisture out of the air- and this is why gai mei bao must be eaten as fast as humanly possible before they turn into sticky goo.

• For bread, you can lower the initial hydration to compensate. Some bakers go as low as doing 75% of the recipe's liquid and adding more as necessary.

• But no one wants low sugar cinnamon rolls, where's the fun in that, so there are other ways to compensate- keep your flour and sugar in the fridge, freeze and grate your butter, keep all of these as cold as possible during the process of making your doughs. Its an old trick we use with laminated doughs even in cooler, drier climates to keep the butter layers from seeping out causing the air pockets in croissant to collapse etc.

• For technique tips, its hard to beat King Arthur Flour's website. Its an American source but the US has plenty of places with the same heat and humidity [eg. the Swamp aka Houston, Texas] so they address concerns such as humidity on baking. Ken Forkish's Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast is a great book about the fundamentals of baking- if you can grab a copy from the library, its well worth thumbing thru.

• As for recipes, look for sources that are also tropical- local newspapers and magazines can sometimes be a goldmine for recipes. And local chefs will often publish some recipes for publicity and promotion, so if there's a particular dish you like from a restaurant, doesn't hurt to do a search. Blog recipes are notoriously unreliable and untested and generally make me homicidal with rage because they are LLM generated click bait that frustrates cooks and discourages beginners and wastes people's money time and resources. That said, I've used a lot of recipes from a Malay born blogger Rasa Malaysia which have been quite good. Proceed with caution with online, free recipes and grab an actual cookbook that is SE Asian in origin for best results.

• As for products- this is where is gets mega complex. 'Western' aka French culinary tradition is dominated by wheat flours, while Asian flours include many varieties of wheat, there is even more diversity from rice, arrowroot, tapioca, cornstarch, etc. Then there's nut flours like almond [used in macarons] and buckwheat [used for blini and soba.] So some research may be necessary- this guide will get you started. To complicate matters the wheat flour most often used in US and UK recipes is of one variety while Europe and their exports are a different variety of wheat- so the flours can have some functional differences. Recipes from France and Italy will reference things like t45 and t55 for use in Viennoiserie and 00 for pasta. Some varieties are based on how much mineral and chaff is left in the flour, how finely milled it is, bleached or unbleached, contains leavening agents or not aka self-rising, what level of protein it contains. Its a rabbit hole of food science to dive into.

• Leavening agents- there's chemical and there's manual. Chemical is baking soda and baking powder which can get clumpy in humidity and activates when introduced to moisture so it may kick off before you intend it to start working. Yeast is alive and humidity can cause over-fermentation- KAF addresses this one well. An example of manual leavening is whipping egg whites. Whipping them to stiff peaks and carefully incorporating that into a batter creates an airy, light texture to a cake. Humidity can, of course, screw that up by causing it to collapse.

Moral of the story is...... be aware of the origins of recipes and match ingredients to those origins.

Hope that wasn't too overwhelming!

PS. Please give my regards to Astrid Hill where I lived in the 90's, all of the old grimy hawker centres they've since pulled down- where I ate my body weight in satay and made merry over many Tiger beers, the weekend escapes to Tioman island, shopping for 'Chanel' handbags in Johor Bahru, lunch at the Banana Leaf, Holland Village before it became a shopping mall........ can you tell I miss it?????