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Yamie Taste of Love cooking contest
May 8, 2008
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With Mother’s day just around the corner, what better way to express your appreciation for your mum than through a cooking competition? This week in Young Expressions, we speak to two Singapore Polytechnic students about their experience of taking part in such a competition. Welcome to the programme, I’m Shereena Sajeed.
The Yamie Taste of Love cooking contest was organised by Singapore Polytechnic's School of Chemical and Life Sciences. There were three winners in total – the most Creative, the Healthiest and the most delicious dish. Each of the winners won a $500 cash prize for the dishes they created.
Singapore Polytechnic student Sindya Balakrishnan and her mum, Jaya won the most creative dish award, thanks to their concoction of Briyani Hainanese Chicken Rice.
Sindya tells us how she and her mum made the dish.
SB: The dish that I was supposed to make was Hainanese Chicken Rice and I wanted to make it more creative. There’s three awards – one for creative, healthier and tasty. I mean I didn’t really expect myself to win. But I just made hainanese chicken rice with a fusion of an Indian idea. I put some colouring into the rice, which made it look like briyani and the chicken, I made it like tandoori chicken and I presented it on a banana leaf and made it look so traditional but yet I displayed the chili sauce, the dark sauce and the chicken dripping sauce, to make it look like the real chicken rice. So there’s a fusion between both the Chinese and Indian dish. So probably that’s the reason why I might have won the award for creative dish.
But does this fusion-infused dish taste more like Briyani or chicken rice? Sindya explains.
SB: Yeah, but the rice is flavoured rice, you see. So it has this Hainanese rice flavour but the colour is the only thing that made it look like an Indian dish but the taste was the Chinese style. But the chicken was totally different. For that I used yoghurt and cooked it healthily. I didn’t use much oil so it was a healthy dish, overall.
Sindya describes the type of rice called Yamie rice that the participants used.
SB: Yeah, they have like six flavours. It comes in six flavours so these students who came up with this food product helped to flavour it like for example, they added in garlic and the necessary ingredients that made it taste like hainanese chicken rice. If you were to make it at home, you have to marinate it. The steps that you have to undergo just to make it taste like hainanese chicken rice, they did it in a simpler way for us, they did it pre-prepared so like people nowadays, it will be much more convenient for them to cook. They just have to add water and cook. They don’t have to run around and start buying all t he ingredients so it’s a convenient way.
When did Sindya’s love for cooking begin? She recalls.
SB: When I was in secondary school, I was in F & N, food and nutrition, one of my subjects so we had to always prepare certain dishes for my cooking practical. So over those years, I always took her ideas, her recipes to cook the dishes, so it’s not a new thing to me. But it was the first time I am cooking with her in the public so for her it was a new experience.
Sindya tells us what she has learnt through her cooking experience with her mum.
SB: I think I’ve learnt that I really need to work on my cooking, yeah. My mum is very good at cooking and she knows how to come up with very creative dishes most of the time. So from that, I kind of learnt just a couple of things whether it’s how you cook it or how patient you’re supposed to be because I’m the type who always think that the more the merrier, so I always put so much salt, so much lemon juice or something like that, into my dishes but it made taste worst. But my mum would adjust it accordingly. So in that way I learnt somethings, I mean more doesn’t mean better.
Paraathi and her mum won the healthiest choice award with their dish called Rainbow Briyani. So how did the mother and daughter team make a typical Indian dish like briyani, healthy? Paraathi explains.
P: Actually, nasi briyani, many people think it is unhealthy but how we made it healthier was we cut down on the ghee content, which actually lowers the fat content in the rice. Moreover we didn’t add in full cream milk, whereby some of them actually did add in full cream milk, we didn’t add it in. We just added rosewater instead and we added some vegetables into the rice, to make it more nutritious and fibre content in it.
The best way to perfect a dish is through practice. Paraathi tells us how her final dish came about.
P: My lecturer actually passed us two packets of rice because this is a new brand and we were not so used to cooking this brand so we actually tried it out at home. The first time we tried, it didn’t turn out that well. The rice was a bit sticky but the second time, we improved on our error and we managed to cook the rice well.
Paraathi, like Sindya, was glad to have shared this experience of cooking with her mum.
P: Actually by joining this competition, I get to work better with my mother and I actually came to know that we have a common interest of cooking and of course, I’ve never cooked for my mother before so it’s something like a tribute to her since Mother’s Day is coming.
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