On Monday The Cook Up with Adam Liaw will return to SBS Food for a second season. Each weeknight from 7pm, the celebrity cook will be joined by a pair of high-profile friends – everyone from the actor Pia Miranda to fellow MasterChef alumnus Julie Goodwin – for half an hour of food, fun and conversation.
While The Cook Up is filmed in Sydney, Liaw’s pre-pandemic adventures took him around the globe. Other food-centric shows saw the cook, writer and TV host explore everywhere from Scandinavia to Singapore. On one trip, filming his show Destination Flavour in China, Liaw happened upon an antique tea shop. There he found a silver tea tray that he instantly fell for – but didn’t manage bring home.
Here Liaw tells us about the tea tray that got away, as well as the story of two other handy personal belongings.
What I’d save from my house in a fire
I hate to say something so seemingly trivial, but it’s probably my noise-cancelling headphones.
I really, really don’t deal well with loud noises and these are absolute lifesavers. I wear them when I’m working, on planes, watching TV at night, and if I could get away with wearing them full-time around my kids without looking like a terrible father, I absolutely would.
I find particular kinds of noise to be a big factor in how I perceive stress. I have no problems with music, or going to footy games or concerts and cheering my head off. But when it comes to combinations of noises like a TV going with an extractor fan and a video game all at the same time, I find it a little difficult. My headphones put in a lot of work as a stress-reduction tool – and if my house was on fire I’d probably have them on already.
My most useful object
Hands down, my rice cooker. It gets used every single day without fail. We’ll usually have it on a timer so each morning we wake up to freshly cooked rice at 6am, and that pot will last us through to dinner.
This one is a whiz-bang pressurised version from Korea and it makes fantastic rice. I add a mixture of about 12 different wholegrains to the rice, so instead of just white rice (although I love white rice) it’s a mixture of white rice, brown rice, amaranth, sorghum, buckwheat, barley, black beans, azuki and various other things. That gives the rice a great taste and aroma, and also more protein and fibre.
In my family (and many Asian families) rice is the centre of just about every meal, which is ironic considering my wife and I often don’t eat it in the evenings. Our children do, however. If nobody is having rice the meal somehow feels incomplete.
The item I most regret losing
I was filming Destination Flavour China a few years ago and I had a rare day off so I went out exploring. I’d wandered around for a few hours when I came across a tiny tea shop in the back streets of a residential area.
I’m a bit of a tea nerd, so I went in and had a few cups with the owner. We chatted and, as well as tea, he also sold tea antiques. He showed me this unspeakably beautiful Qing dynasty silver tea tray and I immediately fell in love. Chinese tea trays are like little tables: you can put teacups and teapots on top, and they have perforations so that when you pour the hot water over the surface, it drains into a reservoir below.
This one was about the size of a large shoe box but made of solid silver, covered with beautiful engravings of dragons and flowers. After a bit of haggling I agreed to buy it. In truth the haggling was half-hearted, because from the moment I saw it I knew I wanted it. It wasn’t cheap, but it was the kind of item you rarely – if ever – find outside China, and when you do the prices are exorbitant.
It was more money than I had with me and I couldn’t use a credit card, so I left the shop and spent a couple of hours trying to rustle up enough cash from ATMs and money changers to buy it. I finally scraped just enough together, but in doing so I’d turned myself all around. When I went back to where I thought the shop was, it just wasn’t there.
High-density residential areas in China are often hundreds of rows of identical apartment buildings, and I spent hours trying to find the shop but just kept going around in circles.
The crew and I drove out of town the next morning, and to this day every time I have tea from my wooden tea table at home, I think about the one I didn’t lose but couldn’t find.
