Tommy Lee is the founder of Tommy Le Baker.
He was trained in French boulangerie, after first studying patisserie. His early years in the baking industry included working as a regional key account manager, supplying bread improvers and ingredients across commercial bakeries.
This experience exposed him to how modern bread is shaped — not only by flour and fermentation, but by systems designed for control, speed, and consistency.
He left that environment, choosing instead to work in a way that allows bread to remain variable, responsive, and alive.
Before everything else, in 2010, there was a small corner off Jalan Ipoh — where bread was first made without the need to conform to expectation.
Today, his work moves in a different direction.
He bakes without additives, and works with a small team in a setup that allows variation, adjustment, and time to remain part of the process.
He don’t chase consistency. He understands why it exists. It makes business easier. It reduces risk. But it also removes something: the variation; the adjustment; the need to pay attention. In his bakery, the bread can change slightly from day to day. That is not a mistake. That is the work.
Tommy, he has seen both sides of bread. The one that is controlled, standardized, and made to behave (the industrial kind of bread). And the one that doesn’t always listen. He chooses the second. Not because it is better. But because it is more honest.
He doesn’t believe in pushing the dough too far. A lot of modern baking relies on heavy mixing, correction, and additives to hold everything together. He has done that before. Now he tries to do less. Less mixing. Less forcing. Let the dough come together over time. When one doesn’t create so much tension, one doesn’t need to fix so many problems later.
He doesn’t run the bakery the way he used to. There is a team now. They are building their own understanding of the dough. His role is not to control them, but to create the space for them to learn from the work itself. Bread teaches, if you let it.
