Tell us about how you started cooking. Were you always interested in it, or was it something you happened to fall into?
I always wanted to cook. I wanted to go to culinary school right after high school, but at the time there weren't many great options and my family wanted me to have a regular degree. So I studied languages at a Thai university, but quit shortly — I was bored. I went to the Gold Coast to study restaurant management at Griffith University; I really wanted to do something in food, even if it wasn't cooking, and graduated with a Bachelor in Restaurant Management.
When I came back to Thailand, I tried to find a job in the F&B industry, but they thought I was overqualified without work experience — nobody took me in. The jobs were either for sales positions, which isn't really my thing. I went back to school, to the University of Adelaide to study for my Masters degree in Gastronomy, run by Le Cordon Bleu.
You learned your chops under the Thai cuisine maestro, David Thompson. Other than Thompson, who were your other culinary heroes?
Amanda Gale and Daniel Moran were the first chefs I worked with. They were the executive and sous chefs at the Metropolitan at the time, they really taught me the philosophy and foundation of good food: how to cook it, how to take care of produce, and things like that. My dad, too (is my culinary hero. I grew up wanting to help him in the kitchen, I suppose one of the reasons why I love cooking now is because dad made cooking fun. Together with him and a Malaysian family friend, from whom I learned to bake.
Your goal at Bo.lan, together with your partner Dylan, is to revive and reinvent old-style Thai recipes for the modern century. How do you accomplish this, and how is it important to you?
We believe in the slow food philosophy. Everything is made here, from scratch — every single thing. We also look at the biodiversity of the produce we have. We don't use salmon or snow-fish if they're not local. All the vegetables — we try to use them only in season. We use herbs and greens that aren't necessarily mainstream; you won't find them in the big Thai restaurants. Pak liang, purple beans, vegetables from the south and the north; all kinds of not-so-mainstream vegetables. They're part of our heritage.
We go to the book fair twice a year and spend days going through old books looking for old recipes. In the old days, only women cook, but they weren't educated, so they couldn't write — it was passed through the generations. No one really wrote a recipe book. The other recipes were in memorial books commemorating a great cook's funeral. So we have to go through all those! From those sources, we may have four recipes for each dish. We'll then mix it up, apply some of our preferences or knowledge, to get the results we want. Sometimes the old recipes ask for ingredients that aren't in use any more. It's all about interpretation.
Thai food from scratch, the way you do it, sounds time-consuming. What goes on behind the scenes?
We go to the market most mornings, just to be in touch with the suppliers and to check out prices. Look at the prep list, see what we have to do. Since we don't use processed food at all here, we have to peel the garlic and shallots and things like that ourselves. Curry paste is especially time-consuming. You have to peel and chop everything; dry red chillies have to be soaked, then chopped. Chopping, peeling, plucking. Thai food is quite tedious to prepare. In each curry paste there are probably ten or 12 ingredients that have to be processed by hand.
The thing with Asian cooking is recipes are only guidelines, you have to go by your taste. Each time you cook it, it tastes different. With important ingredients like palm sugar, our sources don't come from the factory so the taste isn't exactly the same — sometimes it's sweeter, sometimes it's less sweet. If it's rained a lot when the palm sugar is harvested, the sugar won't taste the same. When you cook with these ingredients you really have to go by your gut feel. It's probably the same of all cooking, but Asian cooking is more fluid than other kinds of cooking.
In your opinion, which dish is the perfect Thai dish to represent Thai cuisine and culture to someone who doesn't know much about it?
Thai food is about balance. In one dish, you have all the flavours: spicy, salty, bitter. It's also a balance of texture. Something crunchy, something soft, all in the same plate. I'd probably encourage them to try lots of Thai dishes together. With Thai food it's not about single dishes — something hot, something sour. You try to balance the whole meal and eat different things. Sharing is the key to Thai food, you have to eat with a lot of people, and eat a lot of food. And rice. You have to eat rice with Thai food! It doesn't come together properly otherwise. Rice is the part that makes everything tastier.
I would love people who don't know much about Thai food to try Thai relish. Everyone knows about tom yam and pad thai and things like that. Chilli relish, or naam prik , is the principle of Thai food, the mother of sauce. It's probably not everybody's cup of tea, but it's worth trying — you'd be able to get into the heart of real Thai culture, and understand this is where it all comes from.
What do you think Asian chefs have to offer the world?
Asians are naturally inclined towards food and towards cooking. With Asian food the flavours are more complex and subtle. When I go to a Chinese restaurant and have soup, I can discern the subtle flavours and I might think it's perfect, whereas Dylan might think it's too bland. Non-Asians tend not to have the underlying taste for the complex flavours in Asian food. Growing up with this complexity in our food, perhaps if Asian chefs really want to offer something to the culinary world, it should be to contribute to these Asian sensibilities and flavours internationally. I think many western chefs try to incorporate an Asian taste in their food, but it tends to be on the surface. Western cooking is more rigid, and it's up to us to learn the best from their methods and techniques. It may be harder for them to do the same because Asian cooking is so fluid and emotional.
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