A former lawyer turned MasterChef winner, Adam Liaw is known for his Asian fusion recipes and hosting SBS’s Destination Flavour. He talks about finally getting his TV makeup down to the bare essentials, the nostalgia of fragrance and how a Japanese manga series taught him more than he expected.
What’s thrilling
When I’m filming my series for SBS, I have to do my own makeup and I’ve finally got it down to the core essentials because I have neither the time nor the inclination to get really good at putting makeup on. When they showed me how to put on makeup six years ago, it was a very elaborate routine and it wasn’t really a good fit for me. Now it’s just Mac Studio Fix all over my face with Cover FX Custom Cover Drops. We’re often filming in fairly extreme conditions, so it helps me not get too shiny during that. That’s the No 1 thing you’re trying to avoid when shooting for TV.
I’m in the middle of researching my next series for SBS, so I’m reading Slippery Noodles: A Culinary History of China by Hsiang Ju Lin which is very interesting but not particularly emotive. While I read nonfiction, I try to read some fiction which gives the research a lot more colour and emotion. So I’m also reading a book called A Dictionary of Maqiao by Han Shaogong, it’s more of a Cultural Revolution-style novel. A young guy [is] sent off to live in rural China in the 60s and it’s a touching book. [It’s] a very real account of those things that you’ve heard about in history but never stopped to think about, how that affected the actual people who were sent to live in rural villages, to change their lives completely to fit in with a political framework that they may not have believed in. I like historical fiction. I don’t tend to read as much as I’d like to but this one I’m really enjoying.
It’s cheating in a way – my job on television is to take information that is fairly dry and then give colour to it. When you’ve got someone who has spent so much time doing that through fiction, you can piggyback off that.
What’s nostalgia-inducing
I don’t wear fragrances any more. As of 15 or 10 years ago, I started to only wear fragrances when I’m on holiday and I would wear a specific fragrance for a specific holiday. So when my then-girlfriend, now-wife, and I went to Cuba, I bought a fragrance called Creed Virgin Island Water; when we went to the Amalfi coast, I wore Acqua di Parma. The connection between memory and scent really helps.
I don’t wear those fragrances outside of the holiday but then if I happen to be walking to my bathroom and smell Acqua di Parma, I viscerally remember being on the Amalfi coast or whatever. It’s a very cheap way to get bang for your buck on holidays, by having memories with a sensory connection to them. Sometimes when we are going to our anniversary dinner, I will put a fragrance on from one of the holidays we’ve been on and immediately [my wife] will go, “Oh that’s Cuba,” or, “That’s France.”
When I was learning about Japanese food and Japanese language at the same time, there was a set of manga, graphic novels called Oishinbo, which is probably the most famous Japanese manga on the subject of food. I remember reading those both in English and in Japanese so I could translate the Japanese one and check it against the English one. I spent a lot of time reading those and along the way it taught me a huge amount about Japanese food – probably more than most cookbooks I would have read on the subject. I still see them on the shelf and remember the hours I spent translating that by myself. I don’t like formal study but I don’t like not learning so I have to come up with ways to make it work for me.
What I keep going back to
Unscented baby wipes, which I use every day of my life. It’s the first thing I pack when I am going anywhere. I use them for taking off makeup, refreshing after a flight, anything really. You buy the unscented baby variety; they don’t use alcohol, they don’t dry you out. If [you’re] having lunch, you can use them to wipe your hands. It is the most useful product in the world. That and Cetaphil cleanser and moisturiser, that’s all I tend to travel with. I’ll grab a toothbrush from the plane and that’ll do me for a week. Because I travel so much – I’m on the road pretty much half of my time – I’ve got to travel light and I don’t feel like bringing everything but the kitchen sink.
The book that I pick up the most is The Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit. That’s one I use so often, I don’t bother putting it [back] on my bookshelf – it’s on my desk the whole time. I write in excess of 500 recipes a year. Sometimes, if you have an idea for something, it’s good to bounce it off [this book]. It references flavours that don’t necessarily go with each other but flavours that have been used with each other in other dishes in history. Say you were thinking of oysters and beef – you could look that up and it will say: “You have carpet bag steak, beef and oyster sauce … ” It will show you all these different ways oysters and beef have been used together. It’s written almost as comedy, it’s a weird book, you couldn’t categorise it, it’s got a huge amount of information in it but you could read it like a novel if you wanted to. The author tells you about her travels through trying different dishes and things that she hates. It’s a reference book but they’re not shying away from injecting opinion into it and saying: “These things go great.” As someone who writes recipes an awful lot, it is invaluable.
