Recipe For Success: Cooking Q&A With Poh Ling Yeow

What is your earliest cooking memory?

Poh: It would have to be gathered with all the women folk in my family squatting on the ground in the kitchen, making glutinous rice balls for Chinese New Year.

What’s your favourite Poh Ling Yeow recipe to make?

Poh: Oh, that’s a tough one! I think one of my favourite dishes to make is probably a crème caramel. It’s also my favourite dessert. I love that you can create this amazingly sophisticated dish with just sugar, eggs and milk. It’s very simple but relies on a classic technique that keeps me humble. Even though I’ve made it a trillion times before, I just love to see how minimally set I can get that custard!

What’s your favourite quick dinner?

Poh: One of my favourite quick dinners is very unexpected. Just steamed veg with a good chunk of butter melted over it, lemon, salt and pepper. I have great respect for simple flavours and I love my veg; I actually quite like mushy veg because I never got it as a child. In a Chinese household I grew up with crunchy vegetables. So to me, mushy vegetables are quite exotic!

How important is a good set of appliances when it comes to home cooking?

Poh: So important! As a cook, your kitchen appliances are an extension of your appendages. They’re really going to help you with having success in the kitchen.

And what about the look of an appliance? How important is that?

Poh:  As an ex-designer, I’m always about function as well as form and the new LG Kitchen range ticks both boxes beautifully. It’s impeccably designed, visually and ergonomically.

What is the one kitchen appliance you couldn’t live without?

My oven, because baking has a very special place in my heart. It gives me so much gratification. I associate it with my mum and the very first dishes I learned to cook successfully. Every time you bake in the oven, you have to become one with it. Whenever people ask me, ‘How do I become a good baker?’, I tell them it’s actually getting to know your oven. That’s a really big part of it.

How handy is an oven that has multiple cooking modes, like the LG Steam Oven?

Poh: An oven with multiple cooking modes is such a luxury. What I also love is that it is all-in-one and saves precious kitchen acreage. Plus, when it comes to methods like steaming, you’ve got a really nice amount of cooking space to be able to do big volumes.

What do you love about cooking with steam?

Poh: Introducing more Australians to steam cooking is one of my passions because I think many Aussies tend to associate it with soggy veg (ironically my favourite!) and boring, tasteless food. But Asians do the most delicious things with steaming. Think of steamed pork buns, think of juicy dumplings, made from scratch. You can create so many things with textural interest and flavour with steaming. It’s the cleanest way to cook – soul food for many Asian cultures!

What are your thoughts on air fryers in ovens?

Poh: I love the in-oven air fryer function because I don’t have a lot of surface space for a benchtop one. My favourite thing to use it for is heating up pastries because I love making pies and I love a croissant. It’s brilliant to be able to reheat your pastries to crispy perfection … as good as the day they were born!

As a passionate baker, how handy is a feature like LG’s InstaView™  that lets you see inside the oven without opening the door?

Poh: I just adore it on the LG fridge; the way you can just knock twice to check out what you need to buy. And everyone knows how much I enjoy watching a cake bake, so I love InstaView™ in the oven even more! I can just give the door a quick knock and check out how my cake is rising. I think it’s one of the most fun innovations of this range.

What about the Blue EasyClean™ feature that lets you run a 10-minute steam cycle after every use to loosen grime? Is that something you’d use?

Poh: Honestly, the Blue EasyClean™ is one of my favourite functions of the new LG ovens. As an artist, I just love the vibrant blue enamel interior because I’m a little colour bug! No one else has innovated with colour in the oven interior like this before, but what fun. And the steam clean function is just amazing!

Can you share any other tips for making home cooking easier?

Poh: One of my favourite home cooking shortcuts is just using what’s available to you and not trying to get too fancy or too far ahead of yourself. It’s all about knowing how to balance your salty, sweet, sour and spicy. That can revolutionise the way you cook with very few ingredients.

What about induction cooktops? We know many pro chefs absolutely love them. Are you a fan too?

Poh: Induction cooktops are a very important innovation. As a professional cook, there are so many advantages to them. One of them is that they respond instantly, so you can either ramp the heat up or turn it down very quickly. And that’s great when you’re as chaotic as I am with a million things going on the stove!

I also do things that usually require a double boiler directly on the induction cooktop, like making custards and melting chocolate, because the heat is so consistent and stable. That’s a really comforting thing for a home cook to have.

How helpful is a feature like LG’s Flexi Zone that lets you create one large cooking zone – when would you use it?

The Flexi Zone on this LG cooktop is just so brilliant for flexibility. If you’ve got a really big pan or something that just came out of the oven, like a roast, and you want to make gravy, you’ve got a cooking zone that actually covers the entire surface area. I love it for rectangular iron skillets to cook steaks on.

Finally, what’s your best advice to humble beginners who want to be better cooks?

Poh: My best advice to people who think that they’re bad cooks is just to give it a red hot go. A lot of people have the impression that success in the kitchen just happens naturally, but you often have to ‘repeat cook’ something to perfect it. With new recipes, I often have to have several goes at it. It’s all about being persistent and enjoying the learning when things don’t go to plan.
 

Keen to cook like Poh using the latest cutting-edge kitchen appliances from LG Australia? Visit us in-store or online for more expert advice and to check out the stunning LG Kitchen Collection of ovens, cooktops and rangehoods, all packed with intelligent features for mealtime magic.