Taiwan Today

Baker Wu Pao-chun’s internationally recognized skills have brought the flavor of Taiwanese bread to the world stage.

At 8 a.m. on a day in late March this year, shoppers eager to purchase fresh bread were already packing the interior of a Taipei bakery. Not all of them were happy, however, when Joyce Yang, public relations manager of Hogan Bakery, patiently explained that “the champion bread is sold out today.” In fact, those who had taken the time to read a small sign beside the shop’s front door on their way in would have learned that the eagerly awaited bread would be unavailable until August this year because of an overwhelming flood of large orders.

The craze for the “champion” bread began earlier in March this year when chef Wu Pao-chun took first place in the bread category at the 2010 Bakery Masters, a prestigious baking competition held in Paris. “Since our pastry [consultant] won the championship, our shop has been overwhelmed by orders from everywhere,” Yang says. “The ringer on one of our two phones even stopped working because we’d gotten so many calls.”

Wu began his career as an apprentice in 1986 at the age of 17. It was not an easy time, he says, as bakers normally start work at 3:30 a.m. For the next 14 hours, they mix ingredients, knead and shape dough, then finally bake the bread.

Wu finished his apprenticeship in 1988 and began working in the first of a string of bakeries. His initial competition came in 2006, when he teamed up with Wen Shih-cheng and Tsao Chih-hsiung to compete in the first baking competition ever held at the Taipei International Bakery Show (TIBS), which was then in its eighth year. Wu’s team won the 2006 TIBS competition, thus qualifying for the regional selection round of the 2006−2007 Louis Lesaffre Cup in Guangzhou, mainland China. The Louis Lesaffre Cup is organized by the Lesaffre Group, a large baking yeast and yeast extract manufacturer headquartered in France, and, in turn, serves as a qualifier for the Bakery World Cup, which is held every three or four years. The 2006−2007 Louis Lesaffre Cup marked Wu’s first big international success, as his team was one of nine selected to compete in the Bakery World Cup’s team competition held in Paris in March 2008, where the team won a silver medal.

After his second-place finish in 2008, Wu was more determined than ever to pursue high-profile competitions. “It was a big goal of mine to enter another international competition, since I wanted to know how far I could go,” Wu says. “I wanted to see if I could win a championship.” To prepare for the 2010 competition, Wu quit his job as head chef at the Pasadena Bakery in Kaohsiung, southern Taiwan in September 2008, choosing instead to devote all his time to developing distinctively Taiwanese kinds of artisan bread. That preparation paid off with the win at this year’s Bakery Masters.

Western-style breads such as Wu’s rose and litchi sourdough have been slow to catch on in Taiwan, however, as the local preference was—and to an extent still is—for soft, sweet bread. Wu recalls that when he was serving as an apprentice to master bakers about 24 years ago, the bread market was dominated by traditional Taiwanese bread such as pineapple buns, spring onion buns and red bean buns. Collectively, these varieties of bread are called kashi pan in Japanese, referring to filled buns or buns with toppings.

The pan of kashi pan means bun in both Taiwanese and Japanese. “It’s the same word because bread was introduced from Japan when Taiwan was a Japanese colony,” explains Chang Kuo-rong, vice chairman of the Taipei Bakery Association (TBA), which represents around 300 bakeries in the capital city. Prior to Japanese rule over Taiwan (1895−1945), the island’s bakeries were called Chinese pastry shops and provided only traditional Taiwanese baked goods such as pineapple cakes, Chang says.

“At that time, bread was a rarity for most Taiwanese since not many people could afford it,” says Tsai Ting-tong, who was born in 1919 and is the president of Far Eastern Trading Co. Far Eastern was established in 1951 and began importing milk powder for use in baked goods in 1954. Tsai says he never tasted bread until some time after the end of the Japanese colonial period.

“Not all pastry shops sold bread,” author Chen Rou-jin writes of the Japanese era in her book Wedding Customs in Taiwan, which, among other things, includes a discussion of the first bakeries in Taiwan and common types of bread from the Japanese era. “Some of the shops were dedicated to Japanese baked goods, and some sold fruits, drinks and bread together,” she writes.

Today, however, bakeries are easily found along streets and alleys in Taiwan and sweet buns are thought of as local specialties. In addition to a variety of baked breakfast goods, Taiwanese people also consume bread as an afternoon snack or with dinner, says Ellen Yin, president of Florida Bakery, which was founded in 1950 and now operates two stores in Taipei. In an online survey conducted by the TBA in 2009, 80,000 voters selected spring onion buns and pineapple buns from a list of 10 kinds of bread as Taiwan’s favorite varieties.

The pineapple bun’s name does not come from any pineapple ingredients, but rather from the crisscrossing pattern on its top, which resembles the skin of a pineapple. Its sweet crust consists of sugar, eggs, flour and butter. Wu Pao-chun says that while the pineapple bun is a quintessential Taiwanese baked good, it takes a high level of baking skill to arrive at the “perfect combination of soft bread and crunchy top.”

“When you make a pineapple bun, it’s like using one hand to draw a square and the other hand to draw a circle, pinching and pressing the dough at the same time with both hands,” Wu says.

The spring onion bun trails only the pineapple bun as Taiwan’s favorite baked item. Crispy scallions cover the top of the bun, while soft dough lies underneath, creating the distinctive taste and texture that make the bread a local favorite. Wu says that the key to baking a delicious spring onion bun is “always chopping the fresh scallions right before baking so they don’t dry out.”

In fact, the scallions highlight one of the advantages possessed by Taiwan’s baking industry: the variety and quality of local agricultural products. Chang Kuo-rong, who is also a fan of spring onion buns, says most of the island’s bakeries use green onions from Sanxing Township in Yilan County as a main ingredient, as Sanxing scallions are known for their strong aroma and very soft stalks.

In his championship-winning sourdough bread, Wu uses Jade Purse litchis from Changhua County. The cultivar gets its name from its large fruit, small seeds and thick flesh. Wu says that the dried litchis found in bread from most European countries come from South Africa and are less juicy and tasty than those from Taiwan.

Challenging Times

While there are still many independent bakeries like Hogan and Florida around, they are facing challenging times. The recent global economic downturn created a perfect storm for bakeries, as a wave of layoffs and huge investment losses meant that cash-strapped customers had little appetite for buying more expensive bread. Making matters worse, costs for ingredients went up at the same time, says Wu Guan-ming, general manager of Shun Chen Bakery, a chain that operates 17 outlets in Taipei City. The result was that the number of bakeries dropped dramatically. “Between 2008 and 2009, more than 800 bakeries closed down,” Wu Guan-ming says.

Convenience stores and hypermarkets also began entering the low to middle segments of the market a few years ago, giving independent bakeries new competitors to worry about. “This definitely has impacted the earnings of bakeries, both major and small ones,” Ellen Yin says. “If a family buys several different kinds of bread for the following week on their Sunday trip to the hypermarket, then they won’t visit our bakery on Monday.”

Yin believes that engaging in a price war is not the best way for small retailers to respond to the stiff competition posed by hypermarkets and convenience stores. Instead, bakeries need to innovate by developing their own specialty products, which is the most effective way to keep customers coming back, she says.

The product development team at the 60-year-old Florida Bakery, for example, has developed more than 200 kinds of baked goods, including cakes and cookies, as well as European-style and Taiwanese-style bread. Each year, Yin says, the bakery strives to develop two new flavors. “Some bakeries just follow the current market trends and don’t attempt to innovate by coming up with their own unique flavors, but I doubt that they’ll be successful in the long term,” she says.

The TBA, which was founded in 1946, is also helping independent bakeries work together to compete against large rivals. Working individually, Taipei’s bakeries lacked the purchasing power to order specialized ingredients, association deputy chairman Chang Kuo-rong says. “There’s special flour just for baguettes, for example,” he says, “but our members could only get flour for ordinary bread before. Now our bakeries can get special ingredients like whole-meal flour, and we also have the strength to push manufacturers to improve their products.”

Champion bread maker Wu Pao-chun approves of the TBA’s work, saying that “it’s essential to integrate industry resources and establish a professional organization to help take Taiwan’s baking industry to the next level.”

Over the past 20 years, Taiwan’s bakeries have also faced the challenge of health concerns resulting from a series of food safety incidents. In 1984, for example, milk powder originally manufactured for feeding animals was found in naisu bread, which is made from a creamy mixture of milk, eggs, sugar and shortening. More recently, in September 2008 a scandal broke out in mainland China over milk powder that had been deliberately tainted with melamine. In October that year, harmful levels of melamine were found in some bread items in Taiwan. Chi Kuang-cheng, chairman of the Taiwan Bakery Association, says the organization’s 5,000 members saw sales fall by 30 percent during the melamine scare.

The increasing consumer focus on healthy food has also led the TBA to promote the use of ingredients that contain more fiber and whole grains. The push seems to be paying off, as whole grain bread and European-style bread, which contain less oil and sugar and are known for their health benefits, have increased in popularity, according to Ellen Yin. “Hard breads are more accepted now because of health reasons,” Yin says, “but soft and fluffy breads are still the favorites in Taiwan.”

To increase the level of innovation in the baking industry, the TBA, Taiwan Bakery Association and Kaohsiung Bakery Association have worked together to organize the annual TIBS since 1999. In 2006, it was the TBA and the China Grain Products Research & Development Institute (CGPRDI), which is based in Taipei County, that cooperated to hold Taiwan’s first island-wide baking competition at TIBS. Wu Pao-chun says the 2006 TIBS competition “was a real milestone for the Taiwanese bakery industry, since we’d never put together a national team to compete in international competitions before.”

The Taiwan Bakery Competition Council was established after the 2006 TIBS competition to take charge of raising funds to cover training costs and entry fees for contestants in international bakery competitions. The council’s members come from the three main bakery associations in Taiwan’s bakery industry, the CGPRDI, bakery-related companies and manufacturers, and the U.S. Wheat Associates, an organization that works to develop markets on behalf of American wheat producers. The council raises funds for Taiwan’s contestants through member donations and part of the profits earned by hosting annual bakery shows.

Boosting Education

The TBA and Wu Pao-chun believe that boosting education is the best way to assure that Taiwan’s bakers and baking industry continue to improve. To that end, the TBA funds seminars for its members that feature foreign master bakers.

For his part, Wu Pao-chun has taken on the responsibility of teaching one class per week as a guest lecturer at National Kaohsiung Hospitality College, which trains students for careers in the baking industry, among other fields. Wu also intends to leverage his experience and fame to found an association dedicated to cultivating new baking talent. He has decided to share his knowledge based on his experience of working at several bakeries, where he found many ambitious bakers who wanted to advance their baking skills and knowledge, but had no idea where to receive further training. “I want to pass along my experience and knowledge so that young bakers can learn to do things the right way,” Wu says, explaining that, for example, he only learned how much time and temperature affect the growth of yeast when he attended a seminar in Japan, despite having worked in bakeries for more than a decade.

The master baker has seen that bread can bring happiness, not only to those who eat it, but also to local farmers. This is one reason he plans to unveil the recipe behind his “champion bread,” which hinges on the local litchi cultivar. “If I kept the recipe secret, only a few litchi farmers would benefit from my bread,” Wu says. “But if anyone who’s interested in baking can use the same ingredients, litchi farmers around the island would benefit.”

“Perfect” bread is so smooth that “after the first bite, people can’t stop themselves from eating the whole piece,” Wu says. “And making perfect bread is my lifelong calling.” Those living in Kaohsiung should count themselves lucky, because Wu plans to open his own bakery in the port city in August this year. He may want to look into purchasing additional production equipment as well as a telephone with an industrial-strength ringer, however, as there is likely to be no shortage of customers interested in tasting his perfect, championship-winning bread.

Write to Vicky Huang at powery18@mail.gio.gov.tw