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Taiwan's Future Leaders

The LV of the Bread World

The LV of the Bread World

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Back from the Bakery Masters in Paris with an award-winning bread recipe, master baker Wu Pao-chun is determined to help Taiwan's baking profession hold its head up high.

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The LV of the Bread World

By Jerry Lai
From CommonWealth Magazine (vol. 468 )

After Wu Pao-chun captured the Master Baker award in the bread category at the Bakery Masters in Paris in March 2010, he pledged to dedicate himself to elevating the quality of Taiwan's baking industry.

He quickly went on to show that his aspiration was more than just rhetoric, visiting Taichung and Kaohsiung in a show of gratitude for winning the honor and publicly revealing the recipe that earned him the prestigious prize. In front of packed audiences of more than 100 industry peers and food suppliers in the two cities, Wu demonstrated the proper technique for kneading dough and explained how to control temperature and time in the bread-making process. Those in attendance were allowed to record the entire performance on camera.

As a result, Wu's award-winning bread made of millet wine, dried lychee and rose petals has come into vogue around Taiwan.

"If I didn't do it, who would have?" Wu says in explaining why he decided to shoulder the responsibility of elevating the quality of Taiwan's bakeries.

Wu's desire to enhance the dignity of Taiwan's bakers stems from his sense of inferiority that he developed growing up in a country that showed little respect for the profession. With a less-than-stellar academic background, Wu recalls, "I didn't have enough respect for myself back then. I'd go out on the town wearing flip-flops."

"If becoming a professional baker is my destiny in life, then I want to challenge fate," a determined Wu told himself. After persevering for 20 years, he finally made it to the 2010 Bakery Masters in Paris, and when he saw Taiwan's flag flying among the 12 flags at the competition venue, he was finally freed from the self-abasement that had lingered during his career.

Wu is now quietly cultivating potential contestants for the next Bakery Masters, providing them with a place to work and ingredients. He hopes that the road he has painstakingly pioneered will now be traveled by more Taiwanese baking stars.

"I think that if Taiwan can win the world championship two or three times in a row, everybody will recognize Taiwan's ability to innovate," Wu says.

Beyond coaching a future generation of bakers, Wu has become more of a businessman. In the past, his main focus was on making bread, but now he has begun to understand the importance of packaging, design, flow planning and even finance and marketing. In addition to his bakery in Kaohsiung and a store that he plans to open in Taipei, Wu has now set his eyes on expanding to Tokyo because it is considered in baking circles to be the world's greatest competitive arena.

But when asked about the possibility of opening a bakery chain that reaches all parts of the country, Wu quickly nixes the idea.

"That's not the life I want," he says without hesitation. The main reason is that in order to ensure a perfect experience for his customers every time, he insists that the dough used at his shops be freshly kneaded by hand rather than frozen. His goal is to emerge as the Louis Vuitton of the baking world with a brand as refined as Poilane, one of the most famous traditional bakeries in Paris.

Aside from tending to his own company, Wu's vision has also extended to bread's basic roots – the farm. Last year, Taiwan had surpluses of bananas and lychees, causing their prices to plunge, so Wu developed new breads made from mashed bananas or from dried bananas and lychees.

"To make a kilo of dried bananas, you need 11 kilos of fresh bananas," Wu figures, hoping that his new innovations will sell well so that he can use more favorable prices to absorb the surplus fruit of farmers and create better products.

In April, Wu will appear in the popular television drama series "Drunken to Love You," playing opposite the series' leading actress Rainie Yang. He will essentially play himself, a famous baker who has created an "ice cream croissant" filled with fruit such as mango, banana, strawberry and pineapple grown in Taiwan. Even on screen, as Wu invents a new bread, he is also thinking about helping Taiwan's farmers.

On screen or off, Wu is rewriting Taiwan's standards for the art of preparing fine foods.

Translated from the Chinese by Luke Sabatier

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Keywords:

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