Getting to Know Poh Ling Yeow

Poh Ling Yeow is well known to Kiwis, Aussies, and around the world, as a repeat contestant and recently, judge, on the famous MasterChef Australia series.

I took the opportunity to sit down with Poh while she was on a visit to Aotearoa to catch up with relatives and make an appearance at Auckland’s Food Show. I must confess there was so much laughing going on, and random threads to our conversation, that it took some wrangling to cull these words for your reading pleasure. We chatted all things food and creativity, including how experiences and memories shape our approach to life.

Poh Ling Yeow moved to Adelaide from her birth country of Malaysia at the age of nine, and her earliest food memory is from the age of about six or seven.

I think one of my most potent food memories was having an Asam Laksa, which is sometimes called a Penang Laksa and compared to a Thai jungle curry. It’s not coconut-based, it’s a sour fish broth – sour fish noodles made with mackerel. And then on top, you have got all these really vibrant bits and pieces, fresh pineapple, mint, sliced red onion and torched ginger flower, which has this amazing perfume. And incidentally my aunty I’m staying with here is cooking it for me tonight, because I requested it.

I asked for it because I got my ‘chilli wings‘ on it. My mum used to take me to this little store in Malaysia, sort of a café, and at first I was only able to eat a tiny bowl. She would take me back every week, and I remember feeling this immense sense of pride when I managed to finish a whole bowl because it is so spicy, yeah, but I kind of knew that you like, had to suffer through chilli.

From getting her ‘chilli wings’ in Malaysia to emigrating to Adelaide, Poh’s attitude to the move was incredibly positive. It’s easy to imagine a young girl being fearful or intimidated by the idea of such a change in culture and lifestyle, but in this case the opposite was true.

I tell this story all the time because it is such a potent memory, that when my parents announced to us that we were migrating, I think a lot of kids would be filled with fear or trepidation, but I just knew that life was going to be amazing. I just knew. And I was like, “Okay, great. Life is finally going to make sense”. And when I arrived, I loved everything. Yeah, I loved it! But it didn’t stop me from being my own little weirdo, right? I managed to still feel lonely, even though I had no kids tease me or be racist or anything like that. In fact, I found the kids really friendly. And very protective. But I still managed to feel really on the outer. But I felt like that when I was in Malaysia too. I was this weird little lonesome kid.

Poh reckons this feeling of being on theouter has given rise to much of her creativity, whether in the kitchen, the garden or through her art. She believes that when you’re a little socially removed you have to create your own validation, and fears for the current generation who, when they avoid feeling anxious, also miss out on the valuable lessons from feeling a little uncomfortable, in both creativity and grit.

Learning at a young age that it’s uncomfortable when you’re growing, mentally and creatively... the earlier you learn it and get little notches
on your belt, the better – you can start to build resilience.

It was at Seymour College in Adelaide that Poh first got into art. She started out by imitating her brother who would spend hours drawing, but then it began to feel like a creative outlet of her own. She describes it as being able to go into a really immersive state where she felt completely comfortable, and completely herself – her ‘safe space’ – and it remains that way today. After school she did a Bachelor of Design and is an established and accomplished artist whose work is often on exhibition and available to buy.

When it comes to cooking creatively, Poh credits her mum and one of her aunties as providing inspiration. Surprisingly she didn’t start cooking until her 20s, during her first marriage. Although she had been allowed to bake freely as a kid, the kitchen was strictly off-limits when it came to meal prep.

I started cooking really late, after my first marriage when I was about 24 – and I’m talking bad meat and three veg. Supermarket fillet was the cream of the crop (because we were penniless – both studying in the arts), I would always crack a cream of powdered soup on top with fresh mushrooms chopped up. It seemed exotic to me because we’d never had it growing up! I would commit the crime of over-boiling all the veg because that’s what my friends’ parents did and I just loved it. I only really started learning how to cook Asian just before I went on season one of MasterChef Australia.

It was as a contestant on the TV show that Poh really embraced cooking traditional Malaysian dishes, going on palate memory as she hadn’t been allowed near “fire and knives” in the kitchen growing up. The dishes were mash-ups of what she could remember, and since then her mum and aunty, the two main matriarchs in her family, have helped her develop nuance and technique. One of the most powerful memories from her first season on MasterChef was making congee with pork and century egg dumplings: It was a really different and potentially quite challenging for the judges – I think George couldn’t even eat it because he found the sulphur too overpowering, I think that was a bit of a moment, culturally, and then in Back to Win [MasterChef Australia season 12] I was making a rendang dish... they had Katy Perry just bust through the doors, pregnant, and she was a guest judge and she told me she wasn’t into duck, and she came around and did a bit of a taste while I was cooking – I was worried I was going to induce labour because she found it really spicy, but then she loved that dish and I won that challenge!

The rendang dish Poh was making is now one of her signature dishes (as well as millefeuille, which she still sells along with biscuits, pies and pastries, with dear friend Sarah Rich, co-owner of their Adelaide Farmer’s Market business, Jamface). A labour of love, the Serunding Daging is a dry rendang ‘floss’, often made with duck, that is wrapped in a sticky turmeric rice then wrapped in a bright green pandan roti jala. The dish is “lurid rice and a really rich rendang and I modernise it by serving it with cucumber, coriander and chill relish, so there’s a bit of acidity.”