Not Lost, Just Rising

On washing dishes, baking pandesal, and becoming through the mess

“Cuisine is one of the most fragile cultural products, it is so susceptible to change and yet it is also its lure. Alter any element affecting the sourcing and productions of the food desired and the result will differ. We show our love in how we take care of what is beloved” — Felice Prudente Sta. Maria, from the foreword to Panaderia by Amy A. Uy and Jenny B. Orillos

I. LOST

When something is meant to be, it moves quickly.

I sent a text message to Kimmy of Cherry Moon to let her know of my intention to work in the kitchen, even if it meant washing dishes. So the next day I started working as a kitchen hand.

After Covid, I felt lost and didn't know which direction I wanted to take my photography - or really what I wanted to do for work in general.

I thought, I've always wanted to work in the kitchen, and this would be a great opportunity to do so.

With no direction and feeling lost, I decided what is there to do but to go with the flow?

There were many doubts and the voice within telling me WTF are you doing? While feeling this quiet grief, the one thing that convinced me to stay with it was this quote by Harriett Davidson (via her interview with @umencotalent)

"Take the time. Take the time to explore. Explore everything that interests you, that excites you. Do everything you can to block out those feelings that you should have everything figured out. And take the time to step away from the chaos, the crazy, the clutter of everyday life and listen to yourself. What do you want? What excites you? What inspires you? What scares you? Take the time to follow a feeling - it might feel messy, it might feel like it doesn't make sense, it might be wildly far from the linear trajectory we're often told is the way to go through life. But if you follow those feelings pulling you in a direction, you'll come to understand yourself and what you want."

So here I am in a mess, navigating quiet grief and awe, when one day Kimmy showed me how to make the Cherry Moon Peanut Butter.

One particular moment that stood out was when she said she wanted to taste the saltiness, then the smokiness, and finally the sweetness in that specific order as it hit the palate. I had goosebumps. I’ve been captivated ever since. I realised that there were things in the kitchen, explained simply but precisely, that gave me such a high.

I couldn’t contain the feeling of this new knowledge - that you could layer flavour like that, that you could control how someone experiences salt, smoke, and sweet in a sequence. I used to think flavour was one homogenous thing that as long as it tasted delicious, your job was done. But this was different. This was structured. Intentional. Alive.

I have always wanted to write about food and what better way to do that than to be in the kitchen. I declared this out loud purely to quiet down the doubt and feeling of loss.

I may not understand the point of being in the kitchen, but I held on to the motion. To the awe.

The heart of what Cherry Moon do is FIRE AND BREAD. Perhaps being exposed to this could somehow have awakened something inside me that I couldn't name yet.

II. FOUND IN MOTION

Early mornings, long hours, a pay cut, and being alone with your self-doubt are enough to crush one soul. But I showed up. I didn’t want to disappoint Kimmy. Maybe that was my reason in the beginning, not purpose, not clarity, just not wanting to let someone down. That’s how I kept going. I think I was more committed to this than I realised, but now I see that beneath that commitment was something quieter. A quiet kind of self-abandonment, disguised as strength. And still, I stayed. And still we keep moving.

I heard Ocean Vuong explain something like, you cry until there’s no more tears left to cry but when it’s all finished, you still have to pick yourself up and move on. In a sense, this is kind of like that.

In a sense…

The toast is burnt.
The coffee is cold.
The avocado is overripe.

And yet you keep moving.

Surrounded by fire and bread making and appreciating the craftsmanship of woodfire baking, I found myself picking up pandesal baking at home. I remembered just being committed to finding the right flavour of the pandesal I grew up with. I called it Probinsya Pandesal because it literally uses the most basic ingredients - no butter, no eggs, just flour, yeast, water, salt, sugar and oil.

After one year of washing dishes, making sandwiches, salads, prepping ingredients and always (well, not always) stuffing up proofing the doughnuts at Cherry Moon, I moved on to Tita Carinderia - a Filipino breakfast cafe in Marrickville, where I threw myself into the deep end of baking pandesal without prior experience in commercial baking.

Same doubts, same commitment, just a different location. Yet we keep moving.

Until one day I fell in love with the process of pandesal baking the feeling of dough in my hands, the 4am wake up and the quiet drive to work, problem solving and then the satisfaction of baking at scale and people buying it. I have always wondered why people love being in hospitality. I realised down the track that cooking and feeding people is the best and most immediate feedback of creative work. Unlike a solo creative, where the kind of feedback is delayed and something you have to give to yourself.

III. FOUND IN BREAD

As I find myself lost, the pandesal story is one that was never lost - it found itself.

Pre-colonial bread making in the Philippines gave us tinapay in the form of puto and bibingka using rice flour. In colonial times, the Spanish brought with them a different kind of tinapay called pan de sal originally salty and crusty.

European breads, especially Spanish and French ones, are typically made with high-protein flour (like bread flour), which creates chewy, structured bread (think baguettes, rustic loaves). But the Philippines doesn’t naturally grow wheat, so the locals used low-protein flour, which made the crumb structure tender.

Because of this, the bread naturally became softer, less chewy, and slightly sweet closer to what we now associate with Filipino-style bread: crispy on the outside and softer on the inside, just like the way Filipinos love it.

"The bread contributes to our tastes palate as a nation, reveals what kind of crust and crumb we prefer." - Amy Uy and Jenny Orillos, Panaderia: Philippine Bread, Biscuit and Bakery Tradition

Suffice to say, Filipinos gravitated toward soft bread because it already made sense to their palate. Rice is the staple grain, so soft, fluffy textures were familiar unlike the crusty, dense breads of Europe. Our kakanin culture, with its puto, kutsinta, and suman, only reinforced a preference for tender textures. And Filipino food, at its core, loves push-and-pull contrasts. Soft slightly sweet bread gave relief to salty or rich dishes like queso, corned beef, adobo, or strong black coffee.

So without even realising it, Filipinos made pandesal fit them. As Amy Uy and Jenny Orillos write in Panaderia, Filipinos took a staple of the colonisers and made it their own - not just by adopting the bread, but by adapting it to suit local tastes and textures.

Pandesal didn’t survive because the bread dictated the culture. It survived because the culture dictated the bread.

Pandesal isn’t just a product of survival. Filipinos shaped it, softened it, sweetened it because that’s what felt right.

And that’s why it’s still here in every Filipino almusal. It’s not a relic of colonisation it’s a living, breathing piece of Filipino identity.

Kinda like the same way I thought I was lost yet kept moving forward. Pandesal was never just following Spanish bread traditions it was evolving into something uniquely Filipino all along.

The many years of working as a photographer taught me one thing: good light changes everything. So when people asked me how to find their way, I’d say what I always told myself - “Why force yourself to shoot in ugly lighting situations? Go find the best damn light.”

Why force yourself into a bread that doesn’t make sense when you can create one that does?

Filipinos didn’t just accept Spanish bread as it was. They found their best damn light. They made pandesal*.

I wonder now whether I’ve forgotten this or whether I did put myself in ugly lighting. But maybe that’s what it took. Maybe I had to bake pandesal so I could remember how to find the light again.

Not just any light.

The best damn light.

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A few references

Harriett Davidson, via @umencotalent

Panaderia: Philippine Bread, Biscuit and Bakery Tradition by Amy A. Uy and Jenny B. Orillos

Ocean Vuong, from various interviews and talks his words stays even when paraphrased

Kimmy of Cherry Moon, for the peanut butter moment and everything else

The Governor-General’s Kitchen by Felice Prudente Sta. Maria, for shaping the way I think about food, history, and survival

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*Even the name morphed into one-word “pandesal,” a pidgin version of the original pan de sal. (Panaderia: Philippine Bread, Biscuit and Bakery Tradition by Amy A. Uy and Jenny B. Orillos)