The empty bakery cases at Alameda Marketplace (1650 Park Street) will soon be filled with colorful milk buns flavored with ube, matcha, passion fruit, and pandan, as well as flaky croissants wrapped around spam and savory danishes topped with Japanese furikake seasoning, Kewpie mayonnaise and bonito fish flakes.
Bake Sum [1], the celebrated and critically acclaimed bakery in Oakland, is opening its second location this week in Alameda and will be serving up a mouth-watering selection of treats including their iconic Croissubi—a Spam musubi in croissant form—which was named one of “The 26 Best Dishes We Ate Across the U.S. in 2024 [2]” by the New York Times.
Owner and baker Joyce Tang started the bakery in 2020 as a pop-up and opened the Lake Merritt storefront in 2021, quickly garnering rave reviews for her pastries which she describes as having an “Asian Americana” influence.
“We love to tell stories with our pastries and we also love to bring a lot of new flavors,” Tang told the Alameda Post. “So everything that we make has to be beautiful, delicious, and intentional.” Bake Sum pastries, she explained, “really represent our childhoods across the Bay Area, in ways that haven’t really been represented before.”
Bake Sum’s Okonomiyaki Danish, for example, is based on the savory okonomiyaki pancake, a dish that has roots in World War ll when, according to Tang, there was a rice shortage in Japan and people used flour that had been introduced to them by Americans. “They took leftovers from the fridge and the flour and made okonomiyaki pancakes, which stood for, ‘as you like it.’” The dish is traditionally topped with Kewpie mayonnaise and bonito flakes, and Tang was inspired to recreate the pancake in danish form. “It’s still a crowd favorite,” she says.
Another signature pastry is Bake Sum’s Milk Bun, which Tang said is actually made with half-and-half. The soft buns are dense and moist, and are topped with a crunchy sweet Mexican concha topping. The recipe for the topping came from the Mexican mother of one of Bake Sum’s bakers. Conchas are very similar to the Chinese pineapple bun and the Japanese melonpan—all three are delicious buns with a crunchy sweet topping.
Tang relays a theory that conchas could have influenced the development of the pineapple bun when Chinese workers came to the U.S. to work during the California gold rush alongside Mexican workers. When they got sent home during the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, they took the idea of the pastry home with them.
In addition to pastries, both traditional and Asian Americana-flavored, Bake Sum also has cakes. Tang told the Post that she is “working on a little bit more of a cake-centric menu for Alameda.”
Like her pastries, Tang’s journey to baking was not exactly traditional. Before opening Bake Sum, she had a successful career in tech at Facebook and Google before leaving it all behind to attend culinary school in 2015. Tang says that she was motivated to leave the tech world after taking baking classes.
“I had a wonderful time working in tech,” she explained. “But I did end up taking classes at a local baking school called the San Francisco Baking Institute. I took a week off work and went there to make croissants.” When she returned to work with her baked goods to share with her co-workers, she realized that perhaps she was ready to bake full-time. “I remember driving back to Facebook with like, boxes and boxes of hot fresh croissants. And my coworkers, everyone… it was mayhem. They were so excited. And so happy. And I just remember that feeling so distinctly, and I kept saying to myself, “Why has nothing that I’ve ever done at work made anybody this happy ever?’”
After leaving the tech world and attending the San Francisco Cooking School, Tang landed an externship at El Celler de Can Roca [3], a three-star Michelin restaurant in Spain. After that, she came back to California and made pastries wholesale for coffee and boba shops before starting Bake Sum.
Riding on the success of Bake Sum, Tang has a cookbook coming out on September 1. She told the Post that she has been working on it for two years and that it will feature recipes from her bakery. “I never thought I would write one of these things,” she confessed, noting that she was inspired to write this one after listening to the podcast, Everything Cookbooks [4].
“It’s just really exciting to have a nice little book that’s a nod to Asian American culture and flavors and stories.” The book, which is being published by Hardie Grant, is available for pre-order from all bookstores including local stores Omnivore Books [5] in San Francisco and Walden Pond Books [6] in Oakland.
Jean Chen is a contributing writer for the Alameda Post [7]. Contact her via [email protected] [8]. Her writing is collected at AlamedaPost.com/Jean-Chen [9].