The Secret Ingredient: Sweet Bean Paste

"Cooking or baking are themselves fundamentally acts of translation"

I can’t remember exactly how Gan Chin Lin bubbled up in my Internet awareness, but once I began following her Patreon, I could tell that she was doing something special. Not only is her writing exquisite and specific (much like her speaking — it was difficult to cut any words in this interview), her approach to recipe development is unusually creative and obsessively exhaustive. As you’ll see in this conversation, she takes her research seriously, unafraid to “stumble blindly in languages” in order to get a deeper understanding of an ingredient’s lineage and context.

Our conversation inspired me to start a new project: a Baker’s Ingredient Encyclopedia. It’s just an open Google Doc, and I encourage you to add an ingredient or knowledge/links about one that’s already listed. (If we get enough data, I’ll structure it into something more usable.) The idea is to pool our knowledge about ingredients and their use around the world to help us broaden what we bake in our own kitchens, and maybe push the limits of plant-based baking.

Anyway, I hope you get inspired by this wonderful conversation about sweet bean paste, which is also about re-encountering what is familiar to you from multifarious perspectives. We spoke at 9:30pm to match up timezones (Lin is in Singapore) and I couldn’t sleep for hours afterward because I was googling videos of bean paste fondant and generally wanting to experiment in my kitchen. If this conversation gets you as excited as it did me, follow Lin’s Patreon here.

---

I found it quite difficult to pin down one, because so many ingredients require a lifetime to master and earn a kinship with. I’m still rediscovering things I’ve eaten since I was young, because it's another thing to experience them in the kitchen…But I would go with sweet bean paste. And that can be beans of any kind — adzuki beans, mung beans — both the green and yellow beans — or even lotus seeds.

Kate: Does your relationship with sweet bean paste start with any taste memories? Was it something you liked as a child?

I feel like it was as ubiquitous as peanut butter and jelly to an American. It had that kind of standing in my life. My memory of sweet bean paste is always hot — gaspingly hot — from a bun fresh out of the steamer. You’d be pulling it apart and this molten lava of sweet bean paste would be at its core, and you would burn yourself eating it. The way it would melt in your mouth but also have this pleasurable, gritty sandiness, and the way you’d leave teeth marks in it, like a block of fudge…these very visceral, sensory pleasures of sweet bean paste are what come to mind.

[In Singapore,] sweet bean paste is mostly used in Chinese cuisine as a filling. But beans themselves have always been used in Singaporean sweet making, which includes Malay and Indian recipes as well. There's a local kuih called kuih kasturi, which is mung beans cooked with coconut milk and fresh coconut. It forms a paste, which is dipped into a tempura-like batter and deep fried. The result is this molten fudgy mung bean core with a crackly crispy coating on the outside.

We have dousha 豆沙, which is the red bean paste, and there's also lian rong 莲蓉, which is lotus seed paste. That one is a little firmer, and there is a kind of nuttiness to it. It's so hard to describe lotus seed paste, but it's, like, the blonde version. I feel like we ascribe so much flavor complexity and value to beans like cacao and coffee, but other beans that are more often in savory applications aren’t given this depth. In sweet bean paste, you can really see how to tone the initial flavors. They’re earthy, they’re nutty, there’s a bit of bitterness and creaminess, there’s sweetness. There are ways they can be tempered with things like shallot oil, coconut, ginger, and pandan, which vary the tones and dimensions of these beans so much.

There’s so much value and potential here, and as people concerned with sustainability and agriculture, it's so important to champion the use of legumes and introduce ways to make them more ubiquitous. Being in Southeast Asia, our first recourse [in sweet-making] has always been to root vegetables, starches and beans. For someone who is preoccupied with new ways to bake, or ways to refocus items in traditional confectionary to visualize a better world, it’s empowering to see that these modes of cooking have always been with us.

For sweet bean paste in particular, there are so many applications across cultures. I’ve learned a lot from the Japanese use of sweet bean paste. There is a wagashi, I think the term is nerikiri 練り切り [Editor’s note: wagashi is a seasonal Japanese confection usually made of bean paste], in which a glutinous rice flour scald is kneaded into a body of sweet bean paste. That particular form of moldable bean paste is the highest form of delicacy in a refined kind of patisserie. I feel like this kind of esteem isn't usually afforded to something as humble as legumes. But who's to say that that Japanese technology of working with bean paste can't be used for things like fondant? It requires so much less sugar as well.

In Korean cuisine, there’s this white bean paste baeg-ang-geum 상투과자. They've practiced a method of mixing the bean paste with sugar and starch syrup, and you get this whipped, airy bean paste that can be used to pipe the most intricate buttercream flowers. The way it's able to absorb a lot of water and have a certain degree of plasticity makes it so wonderful. Even some Western bakeries now are starting to pick up on it to make flowers for wedding cakes, because it solves so many problems — it doesn't melt over time, it's able to hold shape, and it still tastes good. So I'm just always constantly learning and absorbing from all the cultures who love beans.

K: How do you do your research?

Just by being a nerd. I love peeking across the wall on social media at Japanese and Korean bakers. I think this osmosis inspires me to dig deeper. Something I feel is key to learning about these cultures is to use the language, and even though I'm not proficient in Japanese or Korean, I always try to use the original terms to search and stumble blindly in languages and characters I'm not familiar with. I think that's a necessary part of the work to position yourself within a culture that isn't yours. And I might get things wrong, but at least I get to a closer version than through a Western channel.

I like to get down in the mud and use Google Translate and then try to back it up with as much other visual information as possible. Even if you plug something in to Google Translate and the thing that comes out doesn't make immediate sense, there's still sometimes a kernel of essential truth that you metabolize first before you arrive at ways to describe it to yourself in English. And you know, cooking or baking are themselves fundamentally acts of translation. So I feel like people should be less scared — like Bong Joon Ho said, if you can get over the one inch barrier of the subtitle, the whole world will open for you. I think people need to be less scared of engaging and being humbled in a language you don’t understand.

There are good and bad things about the state of food media as it is now, with the New World pantry whereby ingredients like harissa, turmeric, miso, and gochujang have all entered the lexicon of Bon Appetit. I wonder, because so many of these ingredients are first delivered to people through this neutral Western-inflected cooking, how much background knowledge transfer is lost in the process. And so [with my writing] I just try to add some additional weight to the baggage, even though it might be exceeding the weight limit.

K: I'm interested in how being in the UK came into your cooking. How did eating and seeing the food there enter into your taste lexicon and what you think about when you want to bake something?

My time in the UK was interesting for me in terms of how I had to restructure a whole kitchen ecosystem in a foreign land. By displacing myself, I was able to think about what is actually essential to me in rebuilding a kitchen from scratch, and what are the tastes and ingredients that I hold as my familiars.

I was very grateful to be able to explore lots of British produce. I could interact with so much produce in my literal backyard or orchards a few blocks down. I understand now why my peers in the UK are so insistent on championing these local food ways. It was enlightening and delicious to experience all these things that I've read about, like rhubarb or even fresh plums or celeriac.

Our local understanding of confectionery has always been affected by colonialism. Things like kaya toast have roots in British predecessors, and even what we see in local bakeries is born out of a British understanding of baking. To be able to see these things in the original country made me able to better articulate the lineage and better appreciate how it was remodeled to use the materials we have here in Singapore. It just made the knowledge transfer over history very evident to me. And then the task becomes like, How do I articulate this?, and How are we able to use this knowledge to strengthen an understanding of national cuisine? Because there is no one culture in Singapore. It's just a mishmash, a confluence, a borrowing, a transfer.

K: What are some of those foods that have been reborn in Singaporean bakeries?

The cakes in our local bakeries are something I've wanted to talk about and share, because they're so unique. Even though they look like your everyday cream cakes from a distance, there are little flavor nuances that make them unique. Like, salted buttercream has been all the rage recently, right? But that made me realize, Oh, we've actually been doing this all along, the buttercream is salted because local palettes don't like that amount of sugar. Or traffic light cakes, where there are three different colored stripes of sugar gel (though I prefer jam). Or simple buttercream cakes, but on top is pressed melon seeds and roasted peanuts and chocolate sprinkles. There’s just this hodgepodge Western understanding of cakes, of what should be presented at a cake making institution, but with an understanding of the people that you're baking for and of the limitations of the material. Because back when it first started, there weren’t as many imports from other countries so we had to make do with what we could. You can see that in the pandan kaya custard cake that I baked recently, where the custard borrows from a local understanding of custard, which is pandan and coconut flavored, but uses things like mung bean starch to set it, instead of gelatin or eggs. I love going to the various confectionaries and trying to re-articulate distinct styles.

I don't think that Singaporeans have really grappled with the understanding that we have a local baking vocabulary. We’re familiar with items like kuihs or our hawker foods as emblematic of a national cuisine, but we don't see that applied to bread or cake making, because those are a byproduct of western influences, and our confectioneries have always been very humble institutions with like a packs of buns for $1. They’re really taken for granted. I don't think there has been a body of work as of yet articulating Singaporean baking. Even though we’re such a new country, I think the work done by these bakeries deserves to be chronicled.

And I know it might seem really strange and counter-intuitive to approach it from a plant-based lens, because, why would you add one more hoop to jump through when so much of the work isn't even done yet? But I feel like it can occur in the same time, because I believe that finding plural ways for these forms to continue into the future is how to continue their legacy.

K: Is there anything else you’re excited about in terms of baking these days?

I’ve started seeing more bakers include bean flours in their bread and I find that really cool. Introducing legumes into the idea of cereal diversification when it comes to baking is so important. It’s ecologically, agronomically and nutritionally sound. And something I'm trying to understand and embody is the role of bakers as culture makers. Because, if you think about it, bakeries are the dominant producers of cereal-based foods in every locale across different countries all over the world. So when it comes to practicing what we preach, I think we should be emboldened to start taking those first few steps. It has only shown to be so exciting and so plural and diverse, and even though the results aren't the same, it doesn’t have to be.

What I'm excited about is people understanding that what they've grown up with or grown used to doesn't always have to be that way. It doesn't mean saying goodbye or letting go of that taste memory, but finding new ways to honor it. And I think the courage that takes from both bakers and consumers is what I'm holding onto in this world.

What I’m Cooking