Looking at the stylish flat lays on the Instagram account of home-based Hakka food biz Haoke Hakka, you’d never imagine it as the product of an extremely humble family. The pro-looking shots are the work of 34-year-old Tok Weilun, former fashion director of glossies such as Men’s Folio and T Singapore, currently senior stylist for shoe brand Charles & Keith’s e-commerce platform.

He is also the man toiling to support his parents and sister. His mum, who is almost 60, left her waitress job at a Japanese restaurant a few months ago as her employer faced cash flow issues during the Covid-19 slump. His 60-year-old dad is a karang guni (rag and bone man) whose earnings were greatly impacted during the Circuit Breaker; and his hearing-impaired younger sister works as a cleaner. “I am now the main breadwinner in the family, so I thought of doing this [selling thunder tea rice and abacus seeds via Instagram] to create a source of income for my mum,” says an upbeat Weilun. Cooking from their HDB flat in Jurong, the Tok family started selling abacus seeds in July, and introduced thunder tea rice in September.

While Weilun’s mum is the key person in the kitchen, Haoke Hakka is a project that involves the entire family. All four of them help to shape the abacus seeds (“our thumbprint is on every piece!”), and Weilun’s sister is the one who does prep work for the fried shallots that top the abacus seeds. On weekends, the family takes his dad’s pickup truck to a farmer’s market in Yio Chu Kang to buy local greens essential for making thunder tea rice. Weilun also takes charge of the marketing and logistics of the business.

Weilun grew up eating his Hakka maternal grandmother’s cooking, and her recipes are used for the bowls sold through Haoke Hakka. “My parents came from Malaysia 40 years ago — my Hakka mum is from Ipoh and my Hokkien dad is from Penang. My maternal grandmother brought us up and we’d make traditional Hakka kueh and thunder tea rice with her on weekends. As kids, we’d help hand-grind the thunder tea paste!” recalls Weilun.

Weilun’s mum is no mere home cook — she used to run a hawker stall in Jurong from 2006 to 2008, selling handmade Hakka yong tau foo and thunder tea rice six days a week. Weilun helped out on weekends and a friend helped her on weekdays. But when her pal stopped working at the stall due to family matters, the workload became too much for Weilun’s mum to bear and they closed the stall.

While Haoke Hakka’s only two offerings are sold mostly on weekends (they recently started offering weekday deliveries for orders above $150, made two days in advance), the prep work is done throughout the week: two days for the abacus seeds, two days for thunder tea rice, and one full day for the chilli dip. “We didn’t include chilli when we first started, because it takes so much time to prepare it! But many customers asked for it so we had to do it.” Weilun also shares that while his mother serves a rather fiery chilli padi dip with garlic, lime and lemongrass for their family meals, the dip they serve is made milder and more accessible.

Weilun’s mum is apparently big on experimenting, but Weilun is keeping her creativity in check for now, preferring to build the brand’s name up through consistency. “We might introduce more dishes in the future, but won’t try to play too much with the dishes already on offer!” he says.

The prep work for abacus seeds take about four hours. It starts with cleaning, steaming, and hand-mashing Thai yams with a secret yam-to-flour ratio. “Mum combines the mixture by hand so that she can feel the consistency of the texture — and yes, only she knows what the correct consistency is!” says Weilun. The dough is then kneaded, rolled out and shaped into individual 'seeds' by hand. “Mum makes huge mountains of dough and we need to shape them fast so that the dough doesn’t dry out in the process,” shares Weilun. These are then packed into batches of 10 and frozen, to be stir-fried with julienned carrots and rehydrated dried black fungus and mushrooms on delivery day.

While Weilun and his sister used to pound the thunder tea paste by hand for their weekend meals, prepping up to 120 portions calls for an industrial blender. Even so, there’s still a lot of prep to be done by hand. The peppermint and mani cai leaves have to be stripped off the stems by hand and washed thoroughly. Just picking the leaves alone takes almost three hours, and this is a task done by Weilun’s mum and dad. There are also mountains of French beans, kailan, purple cabbage, leek and dried beancurd to be diced. “My mum is a machine and can dice the toppings for about 50 portions in 90 minutes. It'd probably take me two to three hours!” laughs Weilun.

Thunder tea rice deliveries are done every Saturday, while abacus seeds are delivered on Sundays. The Toks can churn out an average of 100 portions every weekend, but have the capacity to make around 150 portions. To fulfill the orders, Weilun’s mum wakes up at 5am to start cooking so that the food can be sent out at 10.30am. For thunder tea rice, each of the diced components are stir-fried individually with garlic oil on the morning of the delivery, then assembled with freshly steamed brown rice into 400g boxes. The frozen abacus seeds are also stir-fried with shredded vegetables and minced meat just before delivery.

One of the most beautiful bowls of thunder tea rice we’ve seen. Each massive portion that's good for two is draped with a rainbow-like assortment of leek with fried beancurd, shredded purple cabbage, chopped french beans, mani cai, preserved vegetables, and chopped dried prawns — all lightly stir-fried in garlic oil for fragrance. “The mix of vegetables differs from [Hakka] family to family, and we opted for purple cabbage for colour and better health benefits,” says Weilun, who also shares that he wishes to market thunder tea as a healthy meal option. While there is no ikan bilis, the intensely crunchy, salty pops of cai poh, as well as umami hae bee, kinda made up for it. The veggies are all cooked flawlessly, retaining a lovely freshness and crispness.

Meanwhile, the brown rice base is mixed with black rice for a bit more bite, and the grains are cooked to chewy perfection. But what really won us over is the tea paste, which presents nuanced flavours of peppermint and toasted sesame seeds. A generous portion is given, and we recommend not diluting it too much with hot water — the smooth paste takes on the texture of a fine sesame paste and is highly enjoyable even on its own. Yum yum.

A hefty 320g box, the abacus seeds are a little larger than others that we've tried, and stir-fried in garlic oil with a generous shower of minced pork, dried prawns, julienned black fungus and mushrooms. While some of the pieces were a just slightly doughy in parts, on the whole it’s still rather delightfully chewy with a good bounce. It might not be the best abacus seeds we’ve had (it's hard to beat the umami bombs from home-based business @seke_kitchen), but it is still one of the tastier, more well-executed abacus seeds we've tried.

While Haoke’s thunder tea rice and abacus seeds have a comforting, home-cooked quality, the textures and flavours also boast a sort of finesse that prove the cook knows her way around the kitchen. Given Weilun’s profession as a stylist, it’s no surprise that the dishes score high on presentation — our order came with a postcard printed with an old family portrait of the family, which totally tugged at our heartstrings. These two Hakka classics are tedious-to-make dishes not every home cook can recreate, and therefore absolutely worth ordering.

Order via https://take.sg/s/6588286498. Island-wide delivery $8 per location. Free delivery for orders above $60. https://www.facebook.com/Haoke.hakkasg/

Photos: Haoke Hakka/Koh Yuen Lin