42 December 2013

Work-life balance

Daniel Lin

Photography by Samantha Sin

Kitchencounters

Some Institute members are just as skilful in the kitchen as they are in the office. Jemelyn Yadao sees how they hold the secret success ingredient to

creating culinary magic

December 2013 43

Work-life balanceWork-life balance

Sweet and cit-rusy aromas fill the kitchen as Daniel Lin takes out a small jar of his homemade red

onion marmalade from the fridge. “If I find that it’s too sweet, I’ll put in more balsamic vinegar. If it’s too tangy I’ll

add a bit of sugar,” says Lin, Managing Partner of Grant Thornton Hong Kong and a Hong Kong Institute of CPAs member.

After that, he starts preparing for his savoury crème brûlée, pureeing foie gras in a food pro-cessor, along with a

cup of warm milk and one whole egg. “The milk shouldn’t be too hot,” he says. “Otherwise it will scramble the foie gras. You don’t want to over-beat the egg either.”

Lin’s extensive cookery knowl-edge is the result of having a fond-ness for preparing food since he was a child and a talented mother who encouraged this interest. His mum is a former cooking teacher who stud-ied at the world-renowned Le Cordon Bleu culinary school in Paris.

“I would watch her cook when I was around two or three years old,” Lin recalls. “I would fry an egg and had a little stool to stand on. I roasted my first chicken when I was about six years old.”

While many professionals in Hong Kong see eating out or taking out as an easier option, citing their busy schedules as an excuse, some CPAs like Lin believe that they are never too busy to create culinary delights for both themselves and others.

Lin doesn’t cook as often as he would like, but when he does, he puts meticulous detail into the prepara-tion, just like any passionate profes-sional cook.

“It’s all about the balance of taste,” he says of the secret to getting any dish right. “With tomato, sometimes it’s very sweet or sometimes it’s less sweet. So that’s why you have to really taste it. Just before I do a final tasting and seasoning, I have a sip of water. That’s important because it moistens the palate for me to taste well.”

This Christmas and New Year, he’ll be doing a lot of improvizing in the kitchen, he says, a method that resulted in his mouth-watering Medi-terranean shrimp pasta.

“The heads [of the shrimp] are what really bring out the taste [in the sauce], but I didn’t have enough of them. That’s why I needed to im-provize,” he says. “Sometimes you can add tomato paste or a bit of fish stock or sugar. These things balance the dish.”

To bring out the full flavour of the dish, Lin fried and chopped up one shrimp head, using it to flavour the olive oil before mixing it with the pas-ta and sauce. “I call it waking up the sauce,” he says. “Otherwise, it would

be buried under the other flavours of the dish.”

Lin enjoys cooking a variety of food. Seafood, however, is what he loves cooking – and eating – the most. “Especially crustaceans, such as crab, shrimp, prawns and lobsters. Hong Kong has an abundance of them.”

Cookbooks fill Lin’s bookshelves from top to bottom, from recipe books by famous chefs, including Antonio Carluccio and Gordon Ram-say, to a book about desserts based on modern art. He even has the first cookbook he ever bought on display, Anne Willan’s French Regional Cook-ing, published in 1981. “I bought it when I was studying at Oxford,” he says. “That’s probably inspired me quite a bit.”

Lin sees cooking as a challenge to be mastered, not an escape from everyday life. “I wouldn’t say it’s re-laxing,” he says. “Especially when I go shopping, I’m under pressure [thinking about] what to cook for my friends. Sometimes I buy too much stuff and then I come home and think about what to do with it all. But after they try my food, they feel happy, I feel happy.”

A taste of home For Shilpa Bohra, most weekends are spent reconnecting with an old fam-ily tradition or exploring a combina-tion of two different ones, all through the art of cooking.

Like most Hong Kong residents of Indian descent, Bohra, an Institute member and Asia-Pacific Finance Manager at Messe Frankfurt Asia, a trade fair company, picked up the ba-sics of cooking Indian food from her mother. Her two sons, on the other hand, inspired her to take it to the next

44 December 2013

Mediterranean shrimp pasta

Foie gras crème brûlée

level and to try creating fusion food, a cuisine that combines two or more foods from around the world.

“For pizza, I would use paneer cheese, which is Indian, and mix it with pesto which is Italian. Mixing two different cultures, that’s what they [her children] enjoy,” she says, adding that this style of cooking even helps them to eat healthily. “If I cook simple Indian food that’s healthy, making it more of a fusion food tempts them to try.”

With almost every state in India having its own cuisine, Indian cook-ing brims with variety. Bohra, how-ever, notes that cooking Indian food isn’t as difficult as some may think. “I think making roti [Indian flatbread] is much easier than normal bread. Just use wheat flour and salt. Once you pick up the technique, it’s easy,” she says.

Bohra enjoys being able to im-press her guests with her cooking skills. “I recently cooked for a friend

from India and I knew he was longing for Indian food. He was speechless.”

She puts together authentic In-dian meals such as a thali, a platter filled with little bowls of various Indian dishes. Bohra’s aromatic veg-etarian thali includes three types of hot roti, raita (a dressing made with yoghurt, cucumber and mint), dhal (a staple lentil dish), paneer butter mas-ala (a red nutty curry), masala bhindi (lady’s finger with mixed spices) and rice. “That’s how we generally eat in India,” she says.

Her tendency to cook from scratch keeps her in kitchen longer than others. “For the curry bases, I like to cook using fresh ingredients, which means when buying vegetables, if possible, I cook it on the same day,” she says. “If it’s made on the same day it’s tastier. It does take time and effort but I think it’s worth it.”

Bohra enjoys making bread, espe-cially paratha (pan-fried Indian flat-bread), occasionally incorporating

tofu. “Being a vegetarian, I’m always concerned about giving enough pro-tein to my kids and a tofu paratha is a good and healthy option,” she says with a laugh.

Cooking is also a stress-buster when Bohra is overloaded with work. Two hours of cooking a family favou-rite allows her to recharge. “I have experienced this for so many years,” she says. “When I cook my favourite dishes or my mum’s favourite dishes, it takes me to a different world.”

A winning dishFrom the fragrant steamed fish in black bean sauce to the huge bowl of tomato, potato and beef soup, Chris Chan’s dinning table presented what looked like a sump-tuous Chinese feast. The dishes, he notes, are what he sometimes cooks for friends and colleagues.

“Me and my team at

December 2013 45

Thali

Fusion food

Shilpa Bohra

Work-life balance

work are very tight,” says Chan, a Mergers and Acquisitions Analyst at EY and an Institute member. “I am al-ways inviting them to come over and I’m always the guy in the kitchen.”

Two other dishes – steamed egg with dried scallops, and grilled lamb chops – are also on the table. Each has taken him 15 to 30 minutes to cook, Chan says. “These are also my favourite dishes, which I cook very often, even after a busy day.”

Like most great chefs, Chan’s main influence was his mother, a home economics teacher who passed on her cooking skills to her son when he was in secondary school. His family’s love for cooking even brought them a brief moment of fame. In 2003, Chan and his family took part in a TV cook-ing contest with 100 other Hong Kong families. “In terms of the tastiness of our dish and how interesting was the

story behind the dish, we won first place in the competition,”

says Chan. Having a large kitchen

to himself for four years while he was studying

in the United States perpetuated his passion for making delicious food. “I had a lot of chances to experiment and I cooked almost every day,” he remembers.

Surprisingly, he says, despite the nature of his job involving a lot of travelling, work has allowed him to have another taste of cooking on a daily basis. After recently staying in Beijing for six months as part of work and taking full advantage of having his own kitchen, he picked up the habit of cooking again.

Since he’s been back, Chan has been a fan of cooking quick dishes. “I like to cook Guangdong cuisine the most. It’s generally less spicy and oily compared to other cuisines.”

He doesn’t hesitate when it comes to trying more complicated recipes. “I like how I can exercise my creativi-ty when making a new dish,” he says. “When it turns out to be tasty, the feeling of success is very rewarding.”

Good food can’t be rushed, Chan cautions. “You need to get a sense of how much time you need to spend on baking something or steaming

something.”As well as

timing, he be-lieves that the key to creating an impressive dish is experi-ence. “I always tell my friends: don’t be afraid of cooking. Just cook as often as you can,” he says. “The more you do that the better you’ll get. Practice makes perfect.”

Food science When it comes to cooking the perfect dish, Peter Lee looks up to the British, especially well known chef Heston Blumenthal and food writer Nigel Slater.

“I’m trying to make a dinner res-ervation at the Dinner by Heston Blu-menthal restaurant in the Mandarin Oriental in London, because I’ll be there for Christmas,” says Lee, Man-aging Director of Veco Invest (Asia), an independent asset management company, an Institute member and

46 December 2013

Chris Chan

Grilled lamb chops,

steamed fish in black

bean sauce, tomato

and potato soup with

beef and steamed egg

with dried scallops

Regional President of CPA Australia. “I would say I’m a follower of him.”

Like Blumenthal, Lee has a keen interest in molecular cooking, a style of cuisine in which the chef explores the physical and chemical composi-tion of ingredients, and uses techno-logical tools and scientific techniques to prepare them in new styles.

“It’s about presenting ingredients in a different way, different texture and different form,” he explains, taking green peas as an example. “Instead of a mash, you can present it as a paste. You try to play with the in-gredient.” The creativity behind the technique appeals to him the most. “It provides the dish a different visual appeal and the eater a whole differ-ent experience,” he says.

With Slater, Lee admires him for his uncomplicated, home-style dishes. “When you cook his food, you feel happy,” he says. “When I cook at

home, I would cook in the style of Ni-gel Slater, something easy.”

Lee is keen to try new and dif-ferent recipes and is even open to trying out methods that involve lon-ger-than-usual cooking times. One of his signature dishes is a duck breast cooked sous-vide, which involves long, slow cooking in an airtight bag submerged in a water bath. “I slow cooked it for four hours. The meat is then perfectly juicy and tender.”

Lee’s passion for cooking started when he worked in Australia, where he says he was exposed to – and took advantage of – a wide range of local produce and high quality ingredi-ents. “Beef, vegetables, seafood, you name it. It was so easy to buy fresh,” he recalls.

The Italian way of cooking – and eating – however, is what excites him the most. “Italian cuisine is all about sharing,” he says. Another dish Lee

enjoys cooking is pasta with sea ur-chin. “The sea urchin has to be just the right, soft texture. You can’t over-cook it,” he says.

Lee would one day love to do charity work that involves teaching others how to cook, especially those who tend to eat out. “I’m not going to be the next Jamie Oliver,” he says with a laugh. “I think it’s important to educate the younger generation, when it comes to cooking. So, it’s something I would like to do in the future if I have a chance.”

For the time being, seeing the smiles on people’s faces after they have tried his dishes, and the sim-ilarly meticulous work he does as a CPA, is enough to bring Lee a rush of satisfaction. “The art of cooking is to allow people to enjoy the food,” he says. “It’s about digging in together and sharing your passion, your idea, your effort and the result.”

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Duck breast cooked sous-vide

Peter Lee