Tomodachi

A small recipe from my first bakery years, revisited more than twenty years later.

There are some words that stay with you, even when you do not think about them for many years.

Tomodachi was one of them.

Recently, while discussing breads for Salon du Pain, the idea of a Mexico Bun came up. It was one of those childhood memory breads many of us grew up with in Malaysia — soft, sweet, aromatic, with a thin crust baked over the top.

The conversation slowly shifted towards how that memory could be reinterpreted through brioche. Not as a direct copy of the old version, but as a way of revisiting a familiar bakery memory with the way I think about bread today.

That was when I remembered Tomodachi.

Tomodachi was a name from my early days at Four Leaves SOGO, where I started working when I was sixteen. I still have some of the small notebooks from that time. Pocket notebooks filled with handwritten recipes copied down during production.

When I opened them again, the pages were already stained with butter, sugar, oil, and time. Some were tearing at the edges. Inside were recipes for Tomodachi topping, chocolate Tomodachi topping, Butterstick, and other products from that period.

The ingredients also belonged to that era: margarine, shortening, vanilla essence, improvers. At the time, these were normal. Commercial bakery culture was built around softness, aroma, consistency, and shelf life.

Looking at those pages now, I do not read them as recipes to follow exactly.

I read them as a record of where I began.

More than twenty years later, my way of thinking about bread has changed. I think more about fermentation, ingredients, texture, balance, and how to let a product speak without doing too much.

But the memory of those breads is still there.

Maybe revisiting Tomodachi is not about returning to the past exactly as it was.

It is about meeting that younger version of myself again — the sixteen-year-old baker writing down recipes quickly during work, trying to remember everything, trying to keep up, not yet knowing where bread would take him.

Some ideas stay quietly inside us for years.

Then one day, while talking about a new bread, they return.
Just like an old friend — a tomodachi.