Mar 31 2022.
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How do our food experts cook and eat? This week, culinary consultant and chef, Rashen, takes our Q&A!
1. What’s your first memory of cooking?
Instant Noodles. Before attending Culinary School, that’s all I knew to cook.
2. What do you love about being a professional chef?
It’s a multi-disciplinary job where no two days are the same, and you get to meet and work alongside people from a mixture of backgrounds.
3. What’s work like as a culinary consultant?
Depends on the clients. I will help set up a new kitchen from the ground or just help with training chefs improve their menu and skills. You need to be highly organized and hands-on in the process as a consultant.
4. An underrated Sri Lankan ingredient?
Biling. It’s great on salads, in curries and not enough people use it.
5. What is your go-to dish to make?
Depends on my mood really. It’s either black pork curry or gnocchi. Both I do very well.
6. What was your favourite childhood meal?
Having spent my childhood in Abu Dhabi my Dad used to get me Tawa Naan with heaps of butter and cheese spread with a bottle of Limca lime soda. I can hardly replicate it here unfortunately.
7. What dish do you love to eat but never cook?
Lasagna. I just don’t have the patience to make it.
8. The last supper of your dreams?
Oooh, a big roast with all the works!
9. What’s a dish you would make to impress someone?
My Biang Biang hand-pulled noodles. Always does the job!
10. What’s the most exotic food you’ve eaten?
Deep-fried bugs in Thailand. Though I have to say, it’s nothing special, it tasted like over-fried papadum.
11. Your proudest food invention?
I’ve got a few but the most recent would be the Vegan Coconut Ice Cream
12. What’s a dish you’d love to relive for the first time?
Mochi! I knew how it was made but the first time I had it, it blew me away.
13. As a culinary consultant, you work with others on their dream restaurant. What does your own dream restaurant look like?
I would like to build a restaurant where chefs – like myself - would like to eat. Nothing fancy, it would be more of a hole in the wall serving a 2 item menu like Jerk Chicken and a beverage. If I was to open a restaurant somewhere I wouldn’t want to carry forward the stresses of running a full-on restaurant. I just want to keep it simple and unpretentious. It would probably be on the South Coast of Sri Lanka somewhere close to the ocean. I don’t really have a name but probably something tongue in cheek.
14. You are a chef with a keen eye for presentation - eat with your eyes or think with your stomach – which one wins?
I think it’s 50/50. Food is a multi-sensory experience.
15. When you aren’t working - do the cooking or have someone cook for you?
- Depends on how much wine I have !
16. What has been the most difficult recipe that you mastered?
- A Croissant dough. I just don’t have the patience of Baker or Pastry Chef.
17. On your day off, how would you spend it?
- Beach, sunset drinks, and a late-night movie with takeout.
18. What’s your comfort dish after a long day?
- Anything is comfort food if someone else is making it! I’m not fussy, I like grubby take-out.
19. As an experimental chef, your thoughts on modernizing traditional food?
- I don’t think we should change traditional food unless it's fusion cuisine. I would rather modernize the techniques so the final product improves in texture and flavor.
20. What’s a dish that perfectly illustrates your experience, knowledge and skill as a chef?
- Eggs Benedict. It’s a simple dish but requires finessed techniques. From making the Hollandaise to getting the Eggs just right. It’s patience and practice.
1 Comments
Matilda wilfred Britto says:
Mar 31, 2022 at 03:03 pmThe most inteelectual cook. I admire this boy he is my sonny boy. Godbless you abundsntly and especially that makes delcious meals. All the best my boy. Great success to you and hope you come to see me alongwith your mom. Take care and be safe