In a narrow Bangkok side street where the air smells of diesel and pandan, a woman named Kan stands before a glass jar and waits for it to move. Inside, the surface of the mixture trembles, releasing faint bubbles that glisten under the fluorescent light. She leans close, her eyes searching for the first sign of life. “Listen,” she says, “you can hear them breathe.”
Kan is a marine biologist by training. For most of her thirties, she studied the invisible life of the ocean—the way plankton bloom, die, and give the sea its moods. Her days were ruled by tides, her nights by microscopes. But one April afternoon, when the pandemic sealed Bangkok into a long hush, she found herself with no field to go to and too much silence in her apartment. “I needed to keep something alive,” she recalls. “Anything.”
So she opened a bag of flour.
The first starter—equal parts flour and water—lasted three days. The second, five. The Bangkok air, thick and microbial, overwhelmed them. They soured too fast, turned slimy, smelled like wet fruit. “Everything here ferments,” Kan says. “Fish sauce, nam phrik, bodies on motorbikes—it’s already halfway to decay.” She tried keeping the jars near the air-conditioner, then in the fridge, then submerged in cool water like coral samples. Nothing survived.
Most people would have given up. But Kan approached the problem as she would a coral reef: by mapping its ecosystem. She charted temperature shifts hour by hour, noted humidity, tracked the ratio of bacteria to yeast with the same precision she once reserved for plankton counts. She started collecting samples—wild yeast from mango skins, from rice flour, from the salt air at Bang Saen beach. “Bangkok,” she said, “is my ocean now.”
Her notebooks began to multiply. They filled with diagrams of air bubbles, sketches of gluten strands, and strange hybrid equations that combined marine ecology with baking chemistry. She built a small laboratory in her kitchen: pipettes, digital thermometers, a sourdough logbook. Her friends called her experiments “The Bread Reef.”
Months turned into years. Slowly, one strain survived. It was faintly sweet and unusually patient, able to endure the city’s relentless heat. She named it Plankton—a tribute to her first love and her new one.
On a Tuesday morning in late August, Kan unlocks the metal shutters of her bakery, Tide & Crumb, and steps into the dim light. It is not much larger than a living room: one battered oven, a steel counter, and a single shelf displaying her loaves—round, crusted, dense with life. The walls are the color of sea foam, a nod, she says, to her previous career. “I wanted the bread to feel like it came from water,” she tells me, brushing flour from her hands.
By nine, a line begins to form outside. The customers are mostly young office workers, some foreigners, all of them lured by what they describe as Bangkok’s “real bread.” Most bakeries in the city import their starters and flours, chasing Parisian perfection in a tropical climate. Kan refuses to do that. “If you want Bangkok bread,” she says, “you have to let Bangkok into it.”
Her signature loaf is made with locally grown rice flour and sea salt from Samut Sakhon. It tastes faintly of tamarind and smoke, its crust blistered like coral. She sells only forty loaves a day. When they run out, she closes early and feeds her starter, murmuring softly as if to a pet.
There’s something monk-like about the ritual—though she insists it’s more maternal than spiritual. “You can’t dominate it,” she says. “You have to cooperate.” In this way, Kan has become both scientist and caretaker, hovering between control and surrender.
At night, when the ovens cool and the motorbikes outside fade into the distance, she sits on the floor of her bakery and writes in her notebook. The pages are a mixture of technical data and fragments of thought:
8:12 a.m.—humidity spike, dough sluggish. Note: patience is part of the process. Is bread a form of memory?
She tells me that sourdough reminds her of the ocean because it’s always slightly out of control. “People think the sea is chaos,” she says. “But it’s actually a negotiation. Every wave, every organism—it’s all compromise. Bread is the same.”
When she speaks about fermentation, she slips into the cadence of field notes, describing yeast as if they were creatures she has observed under glass. “They like company,” she says. “They like sugar, but not too much. And they don’t like being rushed.” It’s easy to imagine her in a boat off the coast, taking water samples, whispering to invisible colonies.
Her bread, though born of Bangkok’s humidity, carries an echo of saltwater. The crust crackles like drying coral, and when you tear it open, it releases a faint scent of pineapple and rain. One customer told her that eating it felt “like breathing under the sea.”
Kan smiled at that. “That’s the idea,” she said.
The success of Tide & Crumb has brought attention. Cafés have offered to buy her starter. A Bangkok hotel once proposed an “artisan bread partnership,” but she declined. “If I scale up, I lose the conversation,” she explains. “And the yeast stops talking.”
Instead, she teaches. Once a week, she hosts small workshops for young Thais curious about sourdough. They come expecting recipes and leave with something closer to philosophy. “She doesn’t teach you to bake,” one student told me. “She teaches you to surrender.”
When I visit her again in late September, the rainy season has returned. Thunder rattles the bakery windows, and the air smells metallic, electric. Kan is feeding Plankton, tilting the jar gently to watch the bubbles rise. “You see?” she says. “They know it’s raining.”
Outside, Bangkok moves as it always does—flooded, bright, unstoppable. Inside, Kan watches her small civilization breathe. The city’s heat, the sea’s patience, and her own quiet stubbornness have fused into something alive, fragrant, and fleeting.
The bread cools on the counter, crackling softly, like the sound of a reef in motion.