Few home bakers in Singapore ever venture out of their kitchens to open physical stores, but the handful who do are a cause for celebration. The name Marymount Bakehouse might ring a bell – it’s among the batch of small home-based bakeries which sprung up during the Covid pandemic in 2020. Since then, it’s built up quite a following for its sourdough breads, which tend to be snapped up once they’re fresh out of the oven. And now, it welcomes its first full-fledged café in Farrer Park, where everything on the menu weaves in components of its well-loved sourdough.
The sourdough breads here are a work of art – and we mean literally. Each loaf is intricately hand-scored by chef-founder Ian in beautiful leafy patterns, making it almost painful to slice up. But beyond that, the bakery sticks by a 20-hour natural fermentation process (without commercial yeast to speed it up) for all its dough, to yield more complex flavours and a slightly more pronounced sour profile. The high-hydration loaves also see thinner crusts and a soft middle, but more importantly, they don’t turn stale and hard as quickly. Marymount’s sourdoughs are also lower in gluten and popular among expectant mothers.
Regulars come back for the house loaf ($14.50), a standard white wholemeal country sourdough. But other favourites include the extremely versatile pain de campagne ($15) which is a French country rye, or the Marymount Seeds ($16) which features a trio of sesame, quinoa and sunflower seeds mixed into a base of the house loaf. There are also loaves which pair well with sweet or savoury condiments – the Maple Country Nuts ($15.50), which is a nut sourdough embellished with hazelnuts and walnuts and the faintest whiff of maple syrup; as well as the Tomatillio Salsa Verde ($16.60), which is a herby option featuring green tomatoes, garlic confit, and coriander.
With the opening of a full café space, there’s one more reason to stop by Marymount on top of its sourdough bread. Ian’s whipped up a line of Levain pies all crafted with sourdough crust – think hearty Angus beef shepherd’s pie ($16.90), burnt leek cream and truffle potato pie ($22.50), and more. The sweet-toothed can dig into the French-style apple and rhubarb custard pie ($15.90) featuring homemade custard and tangy rhubarb topped off with detailed sourdough latticework.
But our favourite on the dine-in menu is the lemon cream morel and broccolini pasta ($22). The dish was dreamt up as an innovative way of reducing food wastage. Here, pasta noodles are swapped out for leftover sourdough scraps, with each irregularly shaped strand boasting the perfect al-dente texture, and the cream-based sauce is infused with just enough zest to keep it from being cloying.