“There are already plenty of Western-inspired bakeries that are really good at what they do, we’re not trying to be like them or beat them,” explained Anne Mutiara, co-founder of Seroja Bake. “Instead, we want to explore what it means to be an Indonesian bakery. So all our flavours, recipes, and techniques are all drawn from the local culture and the ingredients we find around us.”
For their first shop in Cihapit, Bandung, Anne and co-founder Faza Chu took full advantage of the city’s strategic location, surrounded by farms and plantations, to experiment with fresh produce and fruits. This is reflected in their menu items like the traditional chicken curry-inspired Foccacia Gulai Ayam and perpetually sold out Pavlova Musim Buah, which features a baked meringue topped with varying foraged seasonal fruits from pomelo, cengkir mangoes to tiwungbunbun, cousin to water guava.
It was also here that they began experimenting with producing their own types of flour from cassava, rice, arrowroot to rice bran, which they use as the base for many of their creations. Stories like that of Kampung Adat Cireundeu—a traditional village in Bandung that up to this day abstains from rice as a symbol of resistance against the Dutch colonial monopoly and turned to cassava as their primary food source—is what fuels the experimentation and research process for local ingredients at Seroja Bake.
Similarly, their newly-opened store in Pondok Indah Plaza 1 also adapts to its surrounding location. “We observed that people here have a strong affinity for jajanan pasar and staple breakfast menus like gado-gado and ketoprak.” Queues start as early as 7AM for their playful renditions of traditional market snacks, which spans the torch ginger flower-infused sponge cake Bolu Manis Kecombrang to the Gabin Tempe Mustard, where a filling of crushed tempe and mustard is sandwiched between two biscuits. Selling up to 1000 pieces daily, popular picks like the Rosella Talam—a delicately tart steamed rice flour and coconut milk cake shaped like a flower—are usually gone by midday.
For those seeking a more substantial meal to start the day, their Ketoprak Mete-Miso offers a savoury twist with a creamy peanut sauce made from stone-milled local cashews combined with umami miso paste. Meanwhile, the Ketoprak Kenari-Dangke swaps the typical tofu with local cheese traditionally enjoyed in South Sulawesi, crowned with a sprinkle of crispy deep-fried banana blossom to replace shrimp crackers for added texture.
While the ingredient-led and exploratory trope may suggest a more youthful clientele, Anne expressed her surprise at receiving appreciative responses from the older crowd, many of whom thanked the team for ‘reinventing’ familiar flavours of their childhood. It’s easy to see how, even for first timers, a visit to Seroja Bake feels a lot like returning home.