Tony Tan's Asian Cooking Class | Tony Tan
Suzy Chase: When two podcasts collide, magic happens. Welcome to Dinner Party, the podcast where I bring together my two hit shows, Cookery by the Book and Decorating by the Book. Around here we're all about cooking, sharing stories behind recipes, and creating a cozy home. I'm your host, Suzy Chase, a West Village wife, mom and homecook. Inspired by Martha Stewart, trying to live in a Nora Ephron movie, surrounded by toile, plaid, cookbooks, decorating books and magazines, cooking in my galley kitchen and living my best life in my darling New York City apartment in the cutest neighborhood in the city, the West Village. So come hang out and let's get into the show.
Tony Tan: Hello, my name is Tony Tan. I am the author of Tony Tan's Asian Cooking Class, and it is my new cookbook.
Suzy Chase: You wrote, this cookbook is an Asian cookbook, written and cooked with fresh eyes. I'd love to hear more about what that means.
Tony Tan: Well, it's quite simple because Asian food or the foods of Asia, it's always been one of evolution, one of adaptability, one of looking at fresh ideas, fresh ingredients and so on. For instance, I'll give you one simple one, until the 1950s or sixties, even seventies asparagus wasn't heard of in Asia. And so by us using asparagus, it symbolizes what we are able to adapt to, and that is we are able to use asparagus and cookie in the Asian way. It could be just done with a little bit of garlic, a little bit of sesame oil, a little bit of salt and pepper, and that's it. And if it is in a Chinese culture, obviously you cook it with a little bit of oyster sauce or a little bit of soy sauce and it just goes on. So this is what I mean by cooking with fresh ice.
Suzy Chase: So when was the first time you had asparagus?
Tony Tan: The first time I actually had asparagus was back in the seventies because asparagus wasn't known in Malaysia at that time. And so because it is a cold climate plant or vegetable, and so it was only when I came to Australia that I realized that asparagus is such a delicious vegetable to eat and use. And ever since then when there's asparagus season, I always cook asparagus with a little bit of chili and a little bit of sour sauce or sometimes oyster sauce
Suzy Chase: With four decades of culinary experience. You've dedicated this book to your beloved mother. You say she taught you what food is all about. So talk a little bit about how your mother instilled passion and the understanding of food and tradition in you.
Tony Tan: Mom was a woman who was born in China. She was an orphan. She was made to work out in the pad fields when she was between three and five years old. I didn't really quite know exactly when, but she had no education. She was extremely resilient. She is what I call a very powerful, intelligent Asian woman who had a tremendous passion about food, and she was very curious about how food works or when she first started out working for the British back in the 1950s to the time when we had our own restaurant, she was one who is always looking at vegetables, looking at foods, looking at different things all the time. So she instilled in me a passion because she took me to the market and she said, look at this particular fish and how fresh it is because the eyes gleam and you can smell the sea.
That's what she would talk about. She would talk about how to peel a prawn or a shrimp like you would say in America, and that is you have got to make sure that that little bit of a tail sticks out beautifully. It has that elegance about it. So that's what she was, she instilled in me a sense of beauty about food and cooking. But the other thing that was really very interesting about her was that she worked as a cook for the Brits. So when Malaysia at that time was Malaya, was under British rule, and so obviously she must have had learned something from them as well because she made the best bread and butter pudding I could possibly think of. She was also fantastic in making roast chicken. And the other thing is she was really, really very good in making curries by using those examples or illustrations, you can see already that she was one that is always curious about food, and that must have been instilled in me about understanding what flavors work and why it should be working and what makes a dish so delicious.
Suzy Chase: You're such a fascinating figure in the food space. You blend deep culinary knowledge with a passion for storytelling. And as a Malaysian born chef, which you were just talking about, what is one dish that instantly takes you back to your childhood?
Tony Tan: One of them possibly would be rot chana over in Singapore. It's also called roti pr, and it is flaky Indian flatbreads. So it's done and cooked in layers. It's virtually like a round disc of a pancake, and that is sort of folded over and it's cooked on a griddle, and that's served with the curry sauce. So that's one of the dishes. The other one that reminds me really very much of is eating rundown, and it's a beef sort of spicy sausage dish cooked with coconut and with plenty, plenty of tropical rhizomes, in other words, gal ginger, all those things. And sometimes people use a bit of turmeric as well, and that's cooked down until the beef is almost folk tender and it's dark and it is sinfully delicious. The other one, which is not in the book and it's chicken rice, it is the world's easiest thing to make and it's just nothing but a poached chicken, but it has to be the best chicken.
And that is cooked down ever, ever so slowly over a part of gently, gently belly moving water until the chicken is cooked through. And then, or the water that the chicken is cooked with is made into a rice dish in Malaysia and Singapore. You eat that with a chili sauce made with nothing but ground ginger and chili. And every once in a while you put a little bit of cilantro that you would say in the states, and it is divine eating. That's part of my heritage because I was born a heese. That's what that is.
Suzy Chase: You're known as a gifted teacher. So what's the biggest mistake home cooks like me make trying to cook authentic Asian food?
Tony Tan: I don't think you like you because I'm sure a lot about food, which I think is just wonderful. I think one of the biggest issues that a lot of home cooks face when it really comes down to cooking Asian food is they tend to think that it's difficult. For starters, it's not. It's the world's easiest thing to make. But don't forget, Asia is a huge continent, and that's one of the reasons why I always break down in my book about where I come from. The food has got to have a certain integrity about it, which I'm sure a lot of home cooks try to emulate as much as possible. That's number one. And the other thing is you don't have to feel intimidated. Second thing is never overcrowd a wok or sauteur or whatever you want to do, particularly when you're doing stir rice. And stir rice is the world's fastest thing to make because you just throw whatever ingredients that you want into your sour, your wok or whatever utensil you're using, and then you make sure that it's on a very high heat and cook it very quickly and it becomes absolutely stunning to eat.
Suzy Chase: Do you think that's the number one secret to cooking on a wok is don't crowd it?
Tony Tan: Yes, very much so. If I'm ever in New York, I'd be very happy to come to your apartment and show you how to do it. It's so easy.
Suzy Chase: That would be amazing. So your Thai duck curry dumplings recipe is on page 77, and you say, this dumpling came about by accident. I would love to hear that story.
Tony Tan: People in Australia know me quite well and they all know that I'm a little bit imaginative is a very good word to describe me, and resourceful is another word to describe me. When people drop by you get a little bit worried about what the hell are you going to do? Because I mean, they usually come to my house with a certain expectation, put it that way. And so you go to the fridge and you see there's a little bit of a roast duck that's left over already. And so you combine a little bit of red duck curry sauce, chop up your duck meat, and then you combine that together and you put that into a dumpling. So that's how that came about. And it since then has become very, very popular with a lot of home cooks as well as restaurants. So they go, it's that easy.
Suzy Chase: Another stunningly beautiful recipe that caught my eye was your Rajasthani Watermelon Curry is that how you pronounce it?
Tony Tan: Yes.
Suzy Chase: Rajasthani watermelon curry. On page 269. Could you describe this dish?
Tony Tan: I came across this a book called 50 Curries of India several years ago, and inside the book was a Rajasthani watermelon curry. And I was just thinking to myself, wow, how exciting is that? Who would've thought that you can make something savory out of watermelon? But having said that, we all know that there's such a thing as pickled watermelon rind, don't we? When you think along the lines that you can turn something that is sweet by nature because watermelon is sweet, but you can, by adding spices to it, it changes its whole tone altogether. And especially when it is on a hot summer's day, you don't really feel like eating, but you also need something that is delicious and savory that fills all your senses about eating good, delicious food on a hot day. That's how that watermelon curry came about. And so what I do is I always encourage people when they come to the cooking school here and just said, now try this. And every time they try this and they says, oh my goodness, it's spicy, and yet it is very sweet as well. And so that's how it all evolved. And what I also do is I add a little bit of lime juice to that lemon juice, whatever you have at hand, and that gives it that really very fresh sour kick to it. So it's just, oh my goodness, describing it is making me salivate, but it's so good.
Suzy Chase: It's cold, right?
Tony Tan: It's like a gazpacho used to serve it at room temperature and you can serve it cold if you want to, and particularly when you're actually serving that with a little bit hot rice on top of that. So that contrast of something cold and something warm, isn't it wonderful under palette,
Suzy Chase: Many of your recipes focus on preserving culinary heritage. Are there any dishes you feel are at risk of being lost?
Tony Tan: It's something that sometimes really worries me really very much because of the way we evolve all the time. And so sometimes we get what is something that is really very traditional, is no longer made by the younger generation. One of them is because people don't make that at home anymore. And that is a stuffed duck. And a stuffed duck is, it's very Chinese in origin and it is called eight jeweled duck. And I see that is already disappearing very quickly because even chefs don't make that anymore because it is a bit fiddly. But having said that to your audience, and that is you've got to tell people to go to a very good butcher, and thank God we still have some good butchers here in Australia. And then what they'll do is they'll burn the duck for you, and all you need to do is you take it home, put the stuffing in there, sew it all up, or skew it all up, and then you cook it. And that's one of the dishes that's fast disappearing. So people don't use lard anymore because all of us want to look skinny and healthy. And I think it's sad that people are scared because they just tend to think that it's going to affect their hearts, cholesterol buildup, et cetera, et cetera. But you don't have to eat lard every day.
You don't have to eat beef tallow every day, but every once in a while when you do it is just like it says, oh my God, it's so delicious.
Suzy Chase: So back to that duck, what do you stuff it with?
Tony Tan: Traditionally what you do is you stuff it with Chinese duck in mushrooms, you stuff that with chesnuts, you stuff that with sticky rice, and then you stuff that with Chinese sausage. And then from there on you can use whatever else you want. And then some families use dried shrimp and they put dried shrimp in it as well. So you can imagine that beautiful harmony and play with flavors, play with textures in your palette because it is just like, wow, you dig something and then you find a nugget of chestnut spoon, another something else. You find some mushrooms in there. That's what that dish is. If you're like, I'll make it for you when I visit,
Suzy Chase: I have a whole list going,
Tony Tan: Okay,
Suzy Chase: I'd love for you to describe this recipe on page 37, Char Kway Teow. Is that how you pronounce it?
Tony Tan: Beautifully, beautifully pronounced
Suzy Chase: Beloved saucy, charred noodle dish with cult status that traces its origins to Fuji province.
Tony Tan: The is a very interesting story. It all started back in pre-war days during the colonial period, a lot of the southern Chinese, so in Malaysia and Singapore as well as huge parts of Southeast Asia, there were a lot of Chinese migrants from the southern part of China. And its origin may Fujian, but some people actually believe that it is also a Teochew dish. The pronunciation is Hainan. So that's what I said. It may be from Fujian Province. It is one of those street food dishes that it's almost mandatory you have to eat whenever you go to Singapore and Malaysia. It is traditionally, here we are back to it again, cooked with lard. And when you render down pop fat, right, and the little crackling that you get behind, then it evolved. Okay. Because originally there were just those two things. And then what they tend to do is they would just add nothing but beans, sprouts into it.
It became a little bit gourmet, and so you add a little bit of seafood into it. So some people believe that it's because it came from the seafarers, the fishermen and so on, and that's why they added a little bit of seafood into it. So they added shrimp to it, they added octopus to it, they added calamari to it and so on and so on. And it just kept evolving as it went along. And then there was or Chinese sausage that was included. And then afterwards people become a little bit more excited. They add a little bit of garlic chives into it, and some people even add a little bit of Chinese mustard greens to it. And then a lot of people add a lot of street food people, or hawkers, as we call them in Malaysia. They add a little bit of cockles to it.
Suzy Chase: Fermentation is a huge part of many Asian cuisines from soy sauce to kimchi to shrimp paste. Do you have a favorite fermented ingredient or dish?
Tony Tan: I grew up in Malaysia, so we are very, very used to eating shrimp paste in Malaysia, it is called Belacan. In Thailand, it's called Kapi, and it is made with fermented shrimp. And what they tend to do is made into a block, and it is very high on the nose, put it that way, but once it is toasted, it has a different flavor altogether, but it's also packed with umami. And you can add as much of the shrimp past as you like, and it is usually mixed with other ingredients to give you that hidden note behind it. But every once in a while can get a whiff of that. But when it is blended with ginger chilies, turmeric, lemon grass, et cetera, et cetera, it creates a beautiful complexity in dish, which is just to die for. So that's my favorite thing to use.
Suzy Chase: So not only are you a food writer and cookbook author, you're also a teacher. So tell me about your cooking school in Australia.
Tony Tan: Well, the cooking school is what I best discover as a boutique cooking school. It is out in country Victoria, which Victoria is a state in Australia. It is about an hour and a bit from Melbourne. So a lot of people come to the cooking school because it is purported to be. So I've got to be careful with my words there because otherwise people would think that I'm showing off and it is considered to a School of Asian excellence. And it's because what I tend to do is I walk people through its culture, its history, its myth, its flavors, its ingredients, seasonality, all those things, which is what that makes my cooking school special.
Suzy Chase: I said, you're a legend.
Tony Tan: I'm not a legend.
Suzy Chase: You really are.
Tony Tan: Far from me. I try as much as possible to inculcate people into a culinary journey to Asia by feeling as though that they are being transported there. But it's in an Australian environment. But out in my garden right now, as we swing into our winter here, I have mustard greens growing. I have garlic chives growing, I have yuzu growing, and I have kumquats as well as makrut lime and lemongrass as well in my hothouse. So all those things just teach people that it is not foreign. It is actually really very accessible. So they walk away after a couple of drinks towards the end of the day, and they feel as though that they've been on a journey with me. And it's also a very small cooking school, having no more than eight people. That's it.
Suzy Chase: Your cookbook is just like that too. It feels like a journey.
Tony Tan: My mission in life, I guess, is to encourage people to explore the cuisines of Asia. So this is why it is done deliberately or written deliberately to encourage people to open their eyes and to make people feel that there are so many dishes in the book that are really, really accessible, but also has a very serious tone about deliciousness, but with very simple recipes.
Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called The Perfect Bite, where I ask you to describe the perfect bite of your favorite dish in the cookbook.
Tony Tan: My favorite dish in the cookbook is Rendang because it represents what I'm all about. And that is a kid of Chinese heritage brought up in Malaysia and now living in Australia, but yet at the same time, being able to fuse all those things because the beef comes from Australia, the cooking method is really very Malaysian, and it speaks of the tropics. That's what that dish is. And rendang, if it is beautifully made, it is fit for a Sultan, or a King, and it has got so many complex notes about it that properly made. It is one of the most beautiful, beautiful dishes you'll ever, ever eat in your life.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Tony Tan: Instagram. On Facebook, and it is Tony Tan 53 on the website. It's called tony tan.com.au
Suzy Chase: Perfect. Well, thank you for being such an inspiration and giving us a tiny private cooking lesson today, and thanks for coming on the show.
Tony Tan: Thank you so much for having me.
Suzy Chase: Okay, so where can you listen to the new Dinner Party podcast series? Well, it's on substack suzychase.substack.com. You can also subscribe to Dinner Party for free on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Additionally, the episodes will be available on both Decorating by the Book and Cookery by the Book. Long story short, you'll be able to listen to it virtually everywhere. Thanks for listening. Bye.
