MASTERCHEF AUSTRALIA: A MALAYSIAN MASTERCHEF AND MEE GORENG MAMAK

Scene: Me having a home cooked Indian Chicken Curry with Boiled Rice at home

As I browsed through YouTube on how to cook Mee Goreng* or Egg Fried Noodle, I saw a cooking channel called Everyday Gourmet that has posted on this recipe and decided to give it a go. Everyday Gourmet is an Australian television cooking show hosted by Justine Schofield, a former Australian MasterChef contestant, currently broadcasted on Network Ten on Australia television. Adam Liaw, the Penang born MasterChef Australia Season Two winner was featured as the guest chef.

MasterChef Australia Adam Liaw with one of his book published by Hachette UK, a UK leading publisher. Photo courtesy of Amazon.com

As always, I am amazed when a fellow Malaysian who happened to be in a foreign country probably migrated there a long time ago living and working as an expat, won a popular reality television cooking show and get famous overnight. My topic of interest here is that how does a Malaysian can somehow do it better when they are doing it outside their home country. As there are always a few bad apples from the whole bunch, I wanted to say this doesn't really apply to all Malaysians overseas.

This is quite a proven fact as shown by many of our fellow home-grown Malaysians like our one and only Ipoh born actor turned Hollywood and Asian film star, Dato’ Michelle Yeoh. She never bragged that she is a Malaysian Chinese migrated to Hong Kong struggling to become a top action film star one day, which she did except that she still does it top notch and flawless.

Which is not the case with Adam Liaw. After spending about 8 minutes watching how he prepared a Mee Goreng Mamak* dish on the channel, claiming to be as accurate as he could get, I noticed the dish was nowhere near accurate as they were not enough sweet soy sauce and there’s a total absence of the main ingredients like chilli paste, dried tofu, cabbage and peanut sauce from the cooking. Even the noodles are still yellow in colour when it’s supposed to be black once the cooking is done. Even so, the host, continue to show her enthusiasm on how quick and clean he prepared the gourmet dish all by himself in just a matter of minutes, with a little help from the host slicing up the garlic, tomatoes, tofu puffs and cucumbers (well that’s more than just a little help).

Personally, for me, it was just an average cooking done by a home born Malaysian featured on a YouTube cooking channel show in a foreign country which doesn’t even resemble the actual dish from his home country as he claimed. Yet, Adam Liaw can still roll up his sleeve and strut his cooking skills on the kitchen counter like a seasoned chef when he might not be able to gain the same popularity and ratings if he were to do the same thing he did, here in Malaysia.

I’m not saying he’s bad or not talented because he is good and skilled in what he does as seen on the reality show but in this one presentation where he demonstrates his skill as a post-MasterChef winner, I don’t think he’s that good. The only thing he could fix this is to claim that the dish is personally modified by him to his own preference and only represent some parts of what consist of the original dish but unfortunately, he never did that. You can watch the whole video here at https://youtu.be/hUGVWGcPxzw.

I’m just going to end this short with finishing up my home cooked meal that I believe deserves a YouTube live cooking telecast that would gain millions of views for a homemade Indian chicken curry and white rice. Sound silly? That's because it does.

*Mee Goreng: A local Malay gourmet of Fried Egg Noodle

*Mee Goreng Mamak: A local Indian Muslim version of Malaysian Fried Egg Noodle