From crafting cozy cafe breakfasts to cataloguing recipes from Michelin-starred tables, cooking farm-style fare in rural kitchens to leading local veggie-centric pop-ups, writer-chef Jamie Pea has approached her F&B career in China as an inquisitive explorer. Today, she's nourishing both body and soul through the ritual of bread baking.

For City News Service's first at-home Chef's Table, we visited Jamie's sunny lane house kitchen to get our hands doughy and hear why she's taken a pause from the restaurant hustle to tend to her needs.

CNS: Tell us about your heritage.

It's a bit long-winded because people will say, "Oh, you're Cantonese," because I was born in Hong Kong, but that's not really accurate – we moved to the US when I was a child, and I grew up in Princeton. My dad is from Fujian Province in China but was born and raised in the Philippines. My mom was born in Taiwan and moved to Los Angeles when she was a teenager.

CNS: You've got a real academic side – a lot of writing, research, and reading in the food space and beyond. Where did that come from?

A lot of my friends' parents were professors at Princeton, and I had access to amazing libraries, plus traveling to Hong Kong every year and also later going to an international boarding school with lots of international kids from all over the world. You know, just learning lots of things.

CN: You didn't start off in F&B…

That's right, yeah my first job was doing PR for Sotheby's, which was my dream role; art and public relations. I was also baking part-time on the weekends. Then I went to London to do PR for a Michelin-starred restaurant, and realized I actually wanted to be cooking. Eventually, I used up my 2-year post-study visa, it was really difficult to get a new visa – I thought, now is a good time to go to China. I didn't know what the food scene was like here, so I decided to go back into art, and hoped that further experience would enable me to go back to London to work again.

CNS: Why China?

I wanted to reconnect to my culture. I don't want to say it in a bad way, but honestly I saw other family members and thought, "I don't want to be an adult who can't speak her own people's language." I felt that I didn't want to be excluded because of that; I wanted to be closer to my culture and have the option to engage with it.

CNS: Your first stop in China was Beijing, right? What were your first impressions?

Once I got to Beijing, it became pretty clear to my new friends that I liked cooking. A friend was developing a new brand focused on a healthy breakfast subscription service, which was pretty ahead of its time – this was before WeChat mini programs and all that – and they brought me on board to design the menus. Over my two years in Beijing, I had a lot of opportunities to do consulting and fun pop-ups. I just went straight into working and learning from behind the scenes with the other cooks and chefs.

CNS: When did you start seriously considering moving to Shanghai?

I decided I wanted to be in the industry, and I really wanted to work at Egg – it was such a cute little place!

CNS: You and Camden [of Happy Place Hospitality] have some history, right?

I've known Camden forever – we went to the same boarding school, but I never spoke to her because she was the cool older kid! Then we both ended up at Saint Andrews in Scotland. I still remember my first week there: I saw her rushing down one of the three streets in this tiny university town, heading to class in her navy blue peacoat and Harry Potter glasses.

CNS: It was a London BBQ that changed everything?

These guys opened a little American-style BBQ spot in London, and when we were post-grads, Camden suggested we check it out together. The place was called Pitt Cue Co, a hot new restaurant in SoHo. This was when we were both first getting excited about food and concepts. At that time, London's dining scene was flourishing and people introduced laid-back, excellently executed concepts, like American pit roast BBQ, for example. So this was one among a handful of ideas that went from food truck to brick and mortar. After waiting about 45 minutes to get in, Camden was so confident and went right up to the founder, saying, "We've heard so much about your place, we're also American." And he said, "Oh, that's really nice, I'll treat you guys to pickleback shots." At the time, it was the most amazing thing – bourbon and pickle juice! It felt so cool. I think that was the moment when we both, independently, thought, "This is a really cool world to be in." Fond memory.

CNS: So, Egg – was that the first time you were managing a kitchen on your own?

Yeah, it was. It felt great, because I love being detail-oriented and being able to do so many little things, not just cooking the food or training the staff: designing the menu, doing WeChat posts, coordinating the pop-up chefs, all those little things. But I think it's not my strength – I spread myself too thin and I don't know how to compartmentalize. So, I decided I should focus on writing and maybe not cooking on a daily basis.

CNS: So, how did you switch things up?

I was talking with my chef friend about wanting to write cookbooks and trying to find more time. A few months later, he said, "Well, I think I have a job for you because that's exactly what we want to do at Tai'an Table." So, that was just good timing – they needed somebody to write who also knew how to cook. It was a lot of work, going through five years' worth of recipes! There were a few missing details – I had to look at the recipe and think, "Okay, that number looks off." Things like that.

Also, having a cooking background helped me think like a chef: Does this process make sense? Sometimes things are intuitive to a chef and aren't written in the recipe, so I really had to think about how to explain things to someone who isn't a chef and fill in those gaps.

CNS: What drew you to the veggie scene after that?

I wrote a short essay about how, in China, I learned from staff meals what it really means to eat sustainably in a non-pretentious way. It's just the way of life here. Like at Egg, during staff meals, we were picking spinach leaves for the salads, and there were so many butts left, so we'd sauté them. I thought that was creative, and my colleague said, "This is how we eat back home in the countryside."

CNS: Can you tell us more about your veggie exploration and how you started thinking about writing a guide?

Since my Beijing days, I've been thinking about this because there were so many Chinese veggies in the market that I didn't know how to identify. I thought it'd be really good to write a guide on how to shop for veggies at the market. I wanted to work on that in earnest, so I collected and tweeted like 100 different recipes using 下厨房 (Xia Chu Fang), a very humble Chinese app. Do you remember Epicurious back in the day? It's like that – aunties and uncles who take really horrible photos and say things like shiliang 适量, which means "a suitable amount." But it's educational, combing through it, because I didn't want perfect recipes. I wanted to see how real people cook at home. I'd compare at least five different recipes and find the commonality between them.

CNS: You worked on a farm, you traveled, you explored. Where are you at on this veggie journey?

I'm still working on the book and getting my mind around how to make it more of a graphic design thing, not a book of recipes but a technique book. There's like a Chinese system for how you prepare vegetables: the different knife cuts, the blanching, so on. If you know the system, you can apply it to any vegetable. I think it's so important, the mentality of Chinese food is so genius and I want to make it accessible to any kind of produce you find, wherever you're living. Chinese cooking is a way of life, it's not just recipes and ingredients. There's a renewed pride in Chinese culture and cooking.

CNS: What prompted you to step back from the environments of professional kitchens... a question on everyone's mind, why bread?

I so admire chef friends and family who handle daily grinds and frequent surprises with steely calm, especially the ones who do it with great cheer. Well, when I turned a creative act into a job, I instead became reactive and reflexive to the task at hand. And because a lot of what I do is customized and seasonal, each new recipe came and went like dandelion fuzz in the wind. I didn't have something, like a bread recipe, to take root and patiently, steadfastly iterate on – to raise like a child, and gift it and test it out on friends week after week. Returning to baking, the discipline that got me started in my cooking life, was a humble return to focus. Focus and meditative repetition, humility and patience in the process of improving the product, learning more about this organism, the sourdough, and feeding friends something that's kind of a fundamental part of their weekly nourishment.

Bread has brought me back to my roots because I kind of forgot that I started with this passion for baking when I was 19! My first year of university, I worked for free at The Peninsula hotel in Hong Kong, which is the most amazing place to start – so intense. I realized I loved it, clocking in at 8am and not leaving till late. I remember the best part was that, as a trainee, I got to do different things every week. The bread baking was definitely not my thing! It felt very industrial, not in a bad way, but I wanted to do delicate cakes, and bread baking was a lot of heavy lifting, right? I didn't understand that intuitive sense of bread baking – you just need so much experience to know how to handle it.

CNS: What is special about making bread?

It's ritualistic, and that's part of living well. It's having these practices that are consistent, and you get a sense of grounding from following the time frames and knowing that there's that abundance every few days or every day. So, the sourdough thing, it kind of held me accountable to this pet I had to raise! I had to check on it daily, every six hours.

CNS: What are these lovely loaves all about? You're calling it "Cosmic Rye."

My sister was living in Denmark, and her host mom made this bread every day. It's a plant-based sourdough, made with all whole-food, natural ingredients: organic rye flour from Xinjiang, sprouted rye, raw cacao powder, hemp hearts, and I add caraway seed during the preferment stage so the flavor really seeps in. I also practice seed cycling with flax, pumpkin, black sesame and sunflower.

CNS: What's seed cycling?

My friend taught me about seed cycling for general nutrition, but especially for women's health. You supplement with specific types of seeds for the two different phases of the cycle, similar to the phases of the moon, also two-week cycles. Your hormones are changing, so to balance them out, you need specific nutrients. So the first two weeks you should eat pumpkin seed and flax seeds because of the omegas and other nutrients, and then the second phase, the following two weeks, should be sesame and sunflower seeds. But I think that as long as you're getting enough of these through the month, it's beneficial for everyone and it's like intuitive to follow. I'm not super strict on nutrition and how many micrograms of things you need at specific times, because health is holistic, right? It's a daily practice.

CNS: Oh wow, it's beautiful.

I really missed making food that could be gifted, I love gifting. When we make restaurant food, it has to be consumed at that location right away, so it feels so nice to have something you can package up. I wanted it to be distinctive as well, but also just feel special when you open it – it's not just a staple, I want it to be a part of someone's home.

CNS: What have you learned on this new journey?

The main thing we can all relate to is learning to slow down because there are so many things to do or opportunities to chase here. I got fatigued from cooking and doing pop-ups and being all over the place, you know, just that rush all the time.

So it seems this has brought a bit of peace and calm to your life and mind. How are you feeling with where you're at now?

I want to say it brought stability, in a way – that's a good word for that grounding you get from having a routine. Returning to baking, especially sourdough, really taught me to do that: to slow down, get healthy, and keep making bread as something grounding. When I started, I was doing it for fun – six months ago, I never would have imagined that this would become second nature to me. If I had it in my mind back then that this was going to be my thing and I was going to sell it and make a brand… then I would have felt too much pressure and tried to rush it.

CNS: How has this experience influenced your personal growth, beyond just baking?

I'm also learning to speak more confidently. There was so much self-censoring before, and I'm learning that whatever I do, if it's coming from my heart, from a sincere place, I can't go wrong, right? So, with this bread thing, it's having the confidence that's built from doing it one day at a time and not having this pressure of doing things wrong or making mistakes. It's just getting to know it well enough to be doing it from intuition, from my heart, from my knowledge. That form of well-being is so helpful.

CNS: Last but not least, your journey has seen you... well, you seem to know so many in the F&B industry in Shanghai. Who are your favorite chefs around town among the folks who are still in Shanghai?

There are too many to name, but some that are doing some cool things recently, Hardeep Somal (Klay), Johnny Pham (Vivant), Sergio Moreno (formerly Commune Social), Dan Li (Yaya's), Paulo Souza (The Merchants), Michael Janczewski (Bastard)