Take A Trip Down Memory Lane Through One of Few Remaining Oldest Traditional Bread Bakeries in Singapore

Sing Hon Loong Bakery (also known as Ghee Leong) located at No. 4 Whampoa Drive is one of Singapore's few remaining oldest and most colorful bread bakery from years gone by. These loaves of bread at this bakery provide a slice of childhood memories that is hard to replace for many of the locals in Singapore. Have you ever went to a traditional bakery shop and enjoyed the aroma and freshness of the baking and you could not resist treating yourself with the breads that are warm, soft and yummy?

What i like about bread is the slight roasted caramel taste characteristic of a well cooked crust and the slightly acid aroma of the fermentation of the inside of the loaf. Many people love bread and bread fills much of our daily life. The reason why i have done this photography shoot on this old local traditional bread bakery is because it relates many things about everyone, about us, about you, about everywhere and for every taste in every moment in life with the bread you ever had.

This family-owned business has been operating in the same area for the past five decades and is widely considered as the most popular bakery shop especially among the residents of Whampoa and Balestier in Singapore. This old bakery is said to produce at least more than 1,000 loaves of traditional brown and white crustless breads. They are then distributed fresh to coffeeshops and provision shops daily.

Freshly baked bread ready for sale. Apart from the all-time favourite traditional white bread, you can also get the wholemeal bread, butter roll, sugar-coated bread and raisin bread loaves.

At any given time the bakery and store is filled with ancient rolling carts holding trays of cooling or already-cut loaves, or soon to be baked dough. The warm, fresh-baked smells from this old bakery reach you on the busy street even before you reach the shop. If you are a bread-lover, this place will draw you in and keep you coming back. 

Fresh off the oven, these freshly baked goodness are placed on rows and rows of the mobile shelves. This is to allow the bread loaves to be cooled down before the workers start to slice away the charred parts and have the bread packed. You will be pull back into the past, seeing how these workers work without machineries but bare hands in the old heydays. From pulling the bread out from the hot oven, to removing the mould to stacking the breads on the rack.

This is one of the most interesting part at the bakery where blackhead bread is baked in the old-school way and with charred tops that are later trimmed off by workers before packaging.

Completely cooled down bread loaves are moved to the table, all prepped for slicing and packing.

After the charred parts have been sliced off, the remaining white, fluffy bread are either sliced by a machine for packaging or manually-sliced by the workers.

With the help of the skilled workers (some have worked there for decades) working hard in front of the high-temperatute oven, each of the bread loaves are individually baked to perfection.

The interior of the few traditional bakeries in Singapore remains the same since day one. Everything is done in the old and traditional way and i really loved the smell of the breads when they were freshly out from the oven.

Sin Hon Loong Bakery in Singapore uses the recipes of old, baked in hot-fired ovens and the large numbers of such bread being produced daily is driven by popular demand for true breads that carry with them the flavors and aromas of century’s tradition. 

I can never get tired from eating the traditional white bread from this traditional bakery. The soft, fluffy texture of the traditional white bread is something that mass-production baking techniques can never achieve. In fact, the traditional white bread here is so good that you can eat it on its own or indulge further with just a simpe spread of margarine and kaya. I sincerely hope that such traditional bakeries can always be part of Singapore’s food scene and should never be gone for good. 

The next time if you are happen to be at the area vicinity, remember to take a couple of loaves home from this nostalgic old bread bakery. :-)