Yeast, or How to Leaven your Hobby

Sibahle Mtongana is in town this week. Name not familiar? Then you may know her show – Siba’s Table, which is a staple of the Food Network on Multichoice’s DStv. Ms. Mtongana is probably Africa’s first genuine celebrity chef, with the show, a cookbook to her name, and now a lecture series.

This column is not about Siba, however, successful as she may be. The fact that she is in Kenya, and she’s made a career out of her passion and skills with food, reminds me of a certain charming, delightful and handsome young man a few years ago. Of course, I’m speaking about myself, thus the charming, delightful and handsome bits may be slight exaggerations.  The few years ago bit is also a slight overstatement. It was many, many years ago, just after I left high school. I was also making my reputation from food, and what follows here is a tale of flour, yeast and the lessons for you if you intend to make money out of a hobby.

My mother is the best baker I know. She can work wonders with an oven, and some of her enthusiasm and knowledge inevitably rubbed off on my brother and I. In that interregnum between the end of KCSE and the beginning of university, I had a little too much time on my hands, and began to bake cinnamon rolls for breakfast. A visiting aunt fell in love with the buns and demanded that I deliver some to her office. In short order, I found myself delivering them not just to her office, but to another four offices in Nairobi’s city centre as wives passed them on to husbands and demand grew.

So why am I not the star of my own show on a food channel somewhere, and a tycoon with dozens of bakeries around the continent? That’s where the lessons come in.

1.     A Hobby Turns Quickly into a Job

Baking cinnamon rolls in your mother’s kitchen, and having a daily order book of hundreds of buns to be delivered to offices around town are on opposite sides of the passion spectrum. A hobby is something you do in your free time, and when the passion flags you’re free to put it down and pick it up again. When a hobby turns into an obligation, however, it means that your mood is the very last thing that matters. If you love making flower arrangements, and you then get an order for a wedding, your sudden attack of hay fever will not matter to the blushing bride. You have to deliver, and to the highest quality possible.

2.     Hobbies are Butter, Jobs are Margarine

Talk to a baker, and they will tell you about how many times ingredients are switched. Customers may love your fluffy croissants – airy and flaky confections that taste of angel food, but they’re not willing to pay the hundreds of shillings per croissant that these would cost. The dirty secret of many baked goods in Kenya is that they do not use the most premium of ingredients, partly because of our penchant for short cuts, and partly because customers would balk at paying proper prices for the genuine item. There are only two bakers of proper red velvet cake in Nairobi that I know of. While a proper red velvet cake calls for butter and buttermilk in its preparation, what you normally get is a concoction made with margarine and food colouring.

3.     Hobbies Very Quickly Turn into Full-Time Affairs

Here’s the thing about baking leavened goods – they take the whole day. For me, I finished my deliveries at around 10 in the morning, and as soon as I got home, the process of baking the next day’s deliveries would begin. Mixing, waiting for the yeast to rise, baking, cooling and bagging was a full-day job. This may not be too much of a complaint, but when you had to deliver on Monday, it meant that Sundays were full working days. At an age when all my friends had to worry about was going to mid-level college, it was a certain cramp to the style of this sixteen year old.

4.     You will attract the attention of Green-Eyed Competitors

Why did I eventually abandon my promising, flour-dusted vocation? It began one day when I was delivering to a brand new building in the city centre, where I had two customers. While I was used to breezing in, making my deliveries and leaving within ten minutes, this time I was stopped by the security guards downstairs, who told me that hawking was not allowed in their building. These, remember, were the very same guards who had been welcoming me with a smile for months. I also used to only make deliveries in a bag, and collect my money at the end of the week, so the accusation of hawking was an absurd one. It made no sense, and I told them as much. They, as expected, kicked the responsibility upstairs, and asked me to speak to the building’s management. Only later did I discover that the owner of a restaurant in that building had lost almost all his tea-time trade, and he had arranged for me to be denied entry. While you may be an amusing distraction for established players, the moment you become a threat, you will have them coming down on you.

Yes, I still, occasionally, have a few people asking for my cinnamon rolls, more than twenty years after I stopped making them. My hands may not be white with flour any more, but the lessons learned stay with me to this day. And you never know, I might just fire up the oven again. Prepare your orders.

Also published in the Nation's 'Saturday' Magazine on 6 August 2016.