In a peaceful patch of Sydney’s north shore, Adam Liaw is unpacking his conflicted opinion of TikTok recipe videos. Specifically, the trend of recipes from amateur cooks going viral on social media; of who gets to position themselves as the expert on a dish, and what that robs us of.
“You’ve got millions of people who tune in to learn how to cook something from somebody on social media who is literally making it for the first time. So it’s the blind leading the blind a bit there,” he groans. “If you’re making a dish for the very first time and you don’t understand the cultural context of it, then you’re trying to teach it to literally tens of millions of people – that, to me, is not ideal.”
He takes a breath and keeps going – articulate, measured and, yet, clearly just a little bit annoyed.
“And to me, food’s all about context. Anyone can combine two things in a pan, but the why you do it and where it’s come from is, I think, just as important.”
We are strolling through the Flat Rock Gully walking track, a leafy walkway where Liaw occasionally skateboards (an admittedly high-risk hobby for someone in his 40s and one he “needs to stop”) and next to the netball courts where he and his wife regularly take their kids to play. The reason why Liaw gets in the kitchen all comes back to family. It was a winning stint on MasterChef in 2010 that propelled him into the realm of professional cooking, but before that a love of food was the inheritance he got from his Singaporean-Malay migrant family. He grew up watching his grandmother create delicious meals and then, as a “naturally curious person”, set out to learn to make them himself.
The walking track we’re strolling down today isn’t far from the Sydney suburb Liaw moved to after winning MasterChef all those years ago, to publish his contractually obligated cookbook and see what would happen next.
“It ages you quite a lot to realise how long you’ve been doing what you’ve been doing,” he says. “I was saying to my wife just the other day that I’ve been cooking professionally now for 15 years – and I just now feel like I know what I’m doing, finally, after all this time.”
It feels unlikely that Liaw ever did not know what he was doing in the kitchen, but “there are levels to it”, he says. For instance, he used to be terrible at baking bread – though, along with much of the rest of Australia, he mastered that elusive skill during the pandemic. In the decade and a half since winning MasterChef, he’s continually sharpened his skills and become one of the country’s most trusted food authorities, working both as a host on shows like SBS’s The Cook-Up and as a writer known for great recipes and refreshingly no-nonsense kitchen advice. (Such as: heat the pan before you add the oil. “Every recipe starts with ‘heat oil in a frying pan’, but that’s not how you cook. You heat up a pan, and then you put oil into it!”)
These days, Liaw’s media career takes him far beyond just the kitchen. An episode of Dateline that airs in March will see Liaw visit Singapore’s notorious Changi prison, meeting both the prisoners subject to harsh conditions and those on the outside campaigning for the end of the death penalty. It may seem like a departure from Liaw’s usual bag, but it was a job he had a personal connection to on a couple of fronts. Firstly, his grandfather was interned at Changi for two years during the Japanese occupation in the second world war – a family history that made it difficult to see the conditions at the prison, where inmates sleep on straw mats, never see sunlight and are not allowed face-to-face visits from family. His grandfather died before Liaw was born. “Mum always said that it was a period of his life that affected him quite deeply.”
Secondly, Liaw has a long-held interest in justice. Before he was a celebrity cook, he made his living as a lawyer, and even “wrote a dissertation at law school about the different sorts of moral imperatives in criminal punishment”.
In fact, he was living in Japan and working as an in-house lawyer for Disney when friends back in Australia told him about a popular new cooking show called MasterChef and, aware of his abilities, encouraged him to apply. He had been thinking about returning to Australia anyway, so he put in an application, promptly forgot about it, and, when he got the call from producers, repeatedly turned them down – sure it was “a bad idea”. Eventually they convinced him, and the rest is history. Sort of.
“I think people always focus on MasterChef being the ‘big break’ or whatever, but for me, I truly don’t think it was – because there was a point there after that where there weren’t actually a lot of things for me to do,” he recalls. “There weren’t a huge amount of commercial opportunities … I was looking to write a second cookbook and the publisher at the time said they wouldn’t give me another book deal.”
It wasn’t until SBS had a host drop out of the show Destination Flavour in 2012 that Liaw got called up to fill in – a gig that led to many more like it, and kickstarted his big career pivot. You’d think that being a lawyer is a very different job to that of a media food figure, but Liaw’s take is a wry one.
“They’re all the same,” he shrugs. “Honestly, everyone’s career is answering emails at this point, and it’s just the subject matter of those emails that has changed”.
For Liaw, the bigger picture beyond TV gigs and book deals and answering those godforsaken emails is getting to remind Australians that cooking is an act of love – something to be enjoyed, not endured.
“Cooking, for a lot of people, has become almost this chore that they want to avoid doing as much as possible. That’s a real shame, and it is a complete function of brainwashing of convenience food culture,” he says. “Cooking is and has been, for the entire history of humanity, the most normal thing in the world to do. And then as soon as convenience foods started to come to prominence in the 1950s there became this entire industry around telling you that cooking was too hard and that you need all these products and things to make your life easier.”
We have, he thinks, collectively got our priorities wrong: “Cooking is seen as [something] you should do as little of as possible, so that you can spend more time at your job that you also don’t like, making money for somebody else. To me, that’s a really broken way of looking at domestic life.”
We’ve found a seat on a stone stoop in the shade, to take a breather before Liaw darts off to meet with an editor and talk recipes. For many, turning a hobby into a job can be a quick way to bleed the joy out of something you once loved. So, I ask, does Liaw actually still cook for his family every night?
“Of course! I think if I got to that point, that’s when I would stop cooking for a living,” he says. “Because cooking for my family is vastly more important [than my career] … It’s the most important thing that I do.”
Adam Liaw will feature on SBS Dateline at 9:30pm on 4 March 2025, and will be available on SBS on Demand
