For this show, we find Bobby Chinn on a beautiful tropical beach where while the crew are preparing the set, Bobby tells us his thoughts on life in general. Then he gets straight into what he does best and cooks one of his favourite dishes: a Vietnamese Crab Salad. Bobby tells us how the Vietnamese use anything from pickled vegetables and peanuts to banana blossoms and lotus roots. They can range from spicy, sweet, sour or sweet and sour, and can also be hot or cold. The one Bobby cooks here certainly has quite a bite to it.
From here we travel with Bobby to a small family run Korean restaurant where he investigates the use of pickled vegetables - Kimchi - as a popular Asian alternative to salads. He meets a grandmother who has been making her own kimchi for 40 years. With the use of archive footage we also see how Asian cultures have used pickling, salting and drying to preserve vegetables for centuries.
Bobby’s second dish is a bit of an oddity, you would not expect an Asian Chicken Salad with Cellophane Noodles to be a dish completely invented in America by Austrian chef. We touch on the origins of fusion cuisine and question whether the cross cultural exchange of tastes between colonial and Asian food over the last 400 years could have been the beginning of it all.
 In the middle of this dish, Bobby shows us his special technique for smoking steamed chicken by burning green tea, sugar and rice into a steamer imparting an amazing woody flavour. The use of noodles in this dish leads us into a sequence where Bobby visits a noodle factory and then a master of the handmade noodle to compare and contrast the variations.
Back to the beach and as the sun goes down, Bobby knocks up a traditional Thai Beef Salad. Salads are typically the spiciest of food in Thai cuisine, are usually given most prominence and can combine fruits, vegetables, seafood, meat, leaves and even flowers. As Bobby finishes cooking, he invites a lucky family of four to taste this classic dish. |
Sentosa Leisure Group, Singapore
Lan Zhou La Mian, Singapore
Chin Boon Foodstuff, Singapore
Togi (Korean Restaurant), Singapore
Link Hotel, Singapore
|
