A SINGAPORE PRESS HOLDINGS WEBSITE
by Debbie Yong
Breadyard While famed artisanal bakeries like Maison Kayser and Baker and Cook made inroads into Singapore recently with much pomp and fanfare, tucked away in a back corner of Dover Drive is an aspirating young Singaporean, quietly leavening dreams of being a professional baker. "Bread is so basic and elemental to a meal, but yet making it can be very complex," says Ivan Ting, a student at the newly minted Singapore University of Technology and Design. The soft-spoken 21-year-old runs Breadyard, a 48-seater, 1,300 sq ft bread-centric cafe on the university's grounds. All of the bread served At Breadyard - even the regular sandwich loaves - is made from scratch. Mr Ting currently has around seven different types of bread in his repertoire, including an olive bread, a rustic country loaf, a fluffy Hokkaido milk bread and a dense pumpkin-coloured carrot and walnut bread with generous chunks of walnut. "I wanted to do sandwiches, which is perfect student food, and I decided to focus on making my own breads because while the bigger chains may have to use frozen mass-produced breads to suit their scale, I have the advantage of being a small cafe, so I can spend more time on details like these," says Mr Ting. The cafe's interiors are stark and canteen-like, nothing too intimidating for students on a budget, as Mr Ting wants to keep the focus on his breads. A set lunch, inclusive of a side and a drink costs from $4.50 to $6.50. The impetus to start his own business was stirred in 2010, he says, when he read a book titled Start-up Nation, written by American foreign policy specialists Dan Senor and Saul Singer. A part of the book had compared the voracious appetite for start-ups in Israel, which currently has the highest number of bio-tech start-ups per capita, with that of Singapore, and had found the latter severely wanting. At a pre-orientation session the next day, Mr Ting and fellow students were asked by the school's administrative staff to suggest the kind of food they would like to see in their school cafeteria, which gave him the idea to start his own cafe on campus. "Students are always put on the receiving end, but maybe it's time to be on the giving end instead," he says. He pitched his idea to the school admin, who granted him a year's deferment of his studies, and later tendered successfully - against large commercial cafe chains - for the campus' designated cafe space. Mr Ting's mum Amy helps to pad out the menu with a range of soups and her signature Peranakan-style fish curry, while older sister Eunice assists with the baking. Both women left their day jobs, as a senior vice-president in a bank and a civil servant respectively, to run the cafe full-time. To show their support for his venture, the Ting family also converted a three-room HDB flat in Ghim Moh they recently bought into a laboratory-kitchen for Mr Ting to tinker around with his recipes. He gets most of his baking tips from the Internet, cookbooks ordered off online bookstore Amazon, and Youtube videos. More complex loaves such as the olive bread and carrot and walnut loaf can take about 16 to 18 hours to produce while the pitas and sandwich loaf require only two hours from start to finish, says Mr Ting, who has clocked in 18-hour work days, and once even stayed overnight in the cafe to watch over the dough mixtures as they were resting. His plan for now is to stabilise cafe operations so he can commence his studies next year, and he hopes to relocate Breadyard, along with the university, to the school's permanent Changi campus in 2014. "As a university cafe we can't be too pretentious or high-end, so I just want to make sure that I do the basic things really well," he says. Breadyard
Singapore University of Technology And Design
Singapore University of Technology And Design
20 Dover Drive
6779 7986
8.30am-6pm (Mon-Fri)
