MasterChef Australia's contestant-turned-judge Poh Ling Yeow is bringing her cooking skills to the demonstration stage at the upcoming Auckland Food Show.
Kitchen fires, emotional jam and a go-to seduction dish. Ahead of her appearance at the Auckland Food Show, MasterChef Australia’s contestant-turned-judge Poh Ling Yeow answers Kim Knight’s burning culinary questions.
Poh Ling Yeow is a Malaysian-born Australian cook and artist who used to call herself Sharon. She was, for a few years, Mormon. She was, for more than a few years, married (twice).
One of her ex-husbands married her best friend. She came second in the first and 12th seasons of MasterChef Australia. She returned, this year, as a co-host and judge. And, if you’ve read even half of one of the many (many) interviews about the life of Poh, you already know all of this.
“I’m seriously putting a stop to those,” she says. “It’s starting to get really boring ... that’s been written about 1000 times already, you know?”
I do. And that’s fine, because I’m on the phone ahead of her whistlestop appearance at the Auckland Food Show with the truly big questions: kitchen implements she can’t live without? Chocolate or lemon? Etc.
Multiple television projects, cookbooks and appearances in the news cycle have, in Australia at least, given Poh “first name fame”. Who needs a surname when the world knows you have a Moroccan-themed television room, that you covet a tailored linen vest by Unikspace and you prefer packet noodles to takeaways (random, sample facts from random, recent interviews).
And here’s another:
“All my cookbooks are scorched! Because I keep turning on the hotplate, right? I’ve actually turned on the front one, instead of turning off the back one and all of my cookbooks have got a scorch mark. Like, I’m talking significant. When I’m leafing through the pages, they all smell like I smoked them.”
More from the (no pun intended) quickfire question list?
The last dish that made Poh cry was, almost certainly, during a MasterChef judging round (”when someone has just toiled over something so hard”) but, the moment she more specifically recalls is personal. It’s been two years since her mother, Christina, died. And maybe two years before that, she’d given Poh a tub of pineapple jam, too burned to make pineapple tarts.
“She left a message that I still have on my phone, saying ‘I think you can do something creative with this’. And it had been sitting at the back of my fridge because I didn’t know what to do with it, and I didn’t want to waste it, and I was really scared of using it.”
Suddenly, a brainwave. Poh would make a breton pastry for her Adelaide baking business Jamface.
“Traditionally, you put in dates that have been cooked in brandy and orange juice. And I thought, that’s actually perfect, because it’s not too far away from a Malaysian pineapple tart but in a large form, and you can just cut slices.
“When I made it for the first time I was very emotional. Just to work with this jam that was one of the last things I own, that I know she has definitely touched ...
“I cut a slice for Dad to have, and I had a slice and then I sold the rest and I felt really strange about it. But I think, like all things, if you want to hang on to it, the thing that you should do most is let go.”
This interview was supposed to be a verbal pressure test. A rapid round-up of the usual culinary suspects (her favourite kitchen soundtrack is old jazz; the cookbook she just finished is A Year of Sundays by good friend Belinda Jeffery) but Poh Ling Yeow is a storyteller. And she’s started this conversation with an admission - she never wanted to be a MasterChef Australia judge.
Poh, 50, has joined the show as it regroups after the shock loss of Jock Zonfrillo, found dead in a hotel room just days before the 2023 season was due to air. Zonfrillo, Melissa Leong and Andy Allen had been with the show since 2019, with only the latter returning this year alongside Jean-Christophe Novelli, Sofia Levin and Poh. The contestant who came second to Julie Goodwin in the show’s inaugural season calls it a “crazy, full-circle moment” - and says that for her, judging has been harder than competing.
“I never vied for that spot ... I have never seen myself as an authority. I think because it scares me to declare things with such gusto. It really freaks me out that I will grapple with words ... I feel like it was just baptism by fire. Finding my words quickly like that. I feel like I need more time.”
Plus, she says, “even when I’ve delivered the challenge with my own lips, I’m still thinking ‘what would I do? What would I do?’ My mind is still manically in contestant mode.”
Poh says her “brand” is to play the clown.
“People don’t seem to have very high expectations of me ... They want me to laugh and fool around, which is my thing. I do invite a lot of what look like approaches from long lost friends from afar, but they’re utter strangers. My MO is to just meet it with equal enthusiasm!”
Which is why, perhaps, she’s as comfortable discussing her “absolutely appalling” ability to retain technical terminology as she is listing the contents of her fridge door.
“What’s not in my fridge door! I have plum wine, leftover salad dressing, oils because I keep a lot of the oils in the fridge. Butter, jam, mustard. A very, very comprehensive range of chilli sauces, mayonnaise, tomato paste. Medicine for my dog. Harissa. What else? Capers, wasabi and copha. Is that enough?”
Is there anything she dreads contestants bringing back to their bench from the MasterChef pantry?
“The one thing I never get excited about is polenta. Apart from that, I’m just excited, no matter what ... I always like to walk around and tell the contestants ‘back in my day’ we used to have timed visits to the pantry. You only got one go, and you had the number of ingredients stipulated ... every time, someone would land back at their bench with a wobbly lip: ‘I’m making a noodle stir fry and I forgot the noodles!’”
Kitchen implement she personally can’t live without?
“A whisk! It makes everything smooth, it incorporates things, you can use it to mash and break things up. I bake a lot, so the whisk is my friend.”
Other friends include ex-husbands Jonathan Bennett and Matt Phipps, and the latter’s new wife Sarah Rich, who is also a longtime best friend of Poh. It sounds complicated but, as she constantly reassures the media, “it’s not”. Phipps is actually her talent agent and he set up this interview, ahead of her appearance at the July 25 preview day of the Auckland Food Show, where she’ll demonstrate potstickers and a pandan and coconut dessert.
“He probably told you? I have had literally a gazillion requests from New Zealand, and I’ve done none of them. Right from when I first finished MasterChef in the first season ... it’s just so nice to be able to, like, scratch that itch.”
Yes, she has been to New Zealand.
“With Matt! We had a honeymoon in Queenstown. Because I asked for a tropical holiday. So that’s what he delivered …”
Yes, she says, she has been wooed with food.
“I was 34. It was one of my boyfriends. It was so cute, he rocked up with his little bowling bag and I had no idea, but he had everything in there to make this incredible gourmet meal for me. But, strangely, I can’t remember what that meal was!”
Does she have a seduction dish of her own?
“It doesn’t feel very sexy, but my pie. I make a really good pie. I do this Guinness beef pie with a blue cheese crust. It’s just a solid. It’s not too garlicky, you can have as little or as much as you want. I think it’s a good one. Followed by creme caramel.”
Shock, horror, reveal: “I only started eating cheese in my 30s. I was working at a gourmet shop, and they were like ‘you have to know how to sell it - so you have to eat it’. And I hated runny eggs. I only ate egg whites until I was in my 20s. And I also never used to enjoy butter. I always baked, so it was always in cakes and stuff, but I never enjoyed the flavour.”
Today it’s different. “Once you go to France ... one of my friends was like, ‘yes, my butter is now going on in centimetres’. We always think about how many kilometres of baguette we’ve eaten.”
One of her favourite aspects of travel, says Poh, is noticing not just what people eat, but how they eat it.
“You go to Italy, and they’re like ‘oh my God, you never put cheese on seafood’! Really? We just load it on in Australia. And seeing the little ‘etiquecies’. They just leave aged balsamic on the table - in Australia, that would probably get stolen! And they trust you to take the amount that is appropriate, not just pour it on for the sake of using something expensive.
“In France, I remember being there with my bestie, she was ‘Oh Poh, no, no, no - we don’t walk and eat’ as I was scarfing down this mille-feuille, shattering crumbs all over my face and jumper.”
She likes the mindfulness of other food cultures. Park picnics in France, for example, where everybody has “many parcels” because they’ve picked up bread from the boulangerie, ham from the deli and cheese from the fromagerie.
“There is a ritual to the selection. I think when you give people more convenience, they’re less grateful and less mindful about the way they consume. So they eat more and then they also waste more.
“Even if you only do it once in your life, it is great to have the experience of growing your own food. Even if you just plant a few pots of herbs or try some carrots, you realise you can’t just have any dirt, because when you have dirt that’s troublesome, the carrots will find the path of least resistance and you have this thing that is wonky and hard to manage and then you have to use so much water to clean it, because it’s so knobbly ...
“Think about if we were only allowed to buy whole chickens and not parts of chickens? We would not just chop off the legs and ditch the rest!”
(PS: Lemon. Always, lemon).
Auckland Food Show: July 25-28, Auckland Showgrounds, Green Lane West. Poh Ling Yeow appears on July 25, with demonstrations at 11.15am and 3pm. Other culinary luminaries scheduled for the NEFF Cooking Theatre include Josh Emett, Tina Duncan, Vaughan Mabee, Annabelle White, Sam Low, Ashia Ismail-Singer, “Healthy Kelsi” and James the Tatooed Butcher. MasterChef Australia is currently screening on TVNZ, with the finale likely to be early August.
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