Jono, Ben & Megan - The Podcast - NZ Masterchef Winner Sam Low Is A Coffee Making Expert!

Episode Date: October 16, 2023

We chat to Sam Low the winner of NZ Masterchef as he releases his brand new book Modern Chinese!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sam Lowe, he was the winner of MasterChef New Zealand a few years ago. He's got a brand new cookbook out called Modern Chinese. Winner of MasterChef and loser of Tuesday Morning having to get up this early. Sam, welcome. Thank you for having me. Hey, nice to see you. Of course, winner of MasterChef and now has a brand new cookbook out called Modern Chinese. Congratulations.

Thank you. Yeah, it's finally out in the world and it's everywhere around New Zealand at the moment. You were taking photos and stuff for the book across the road from where we work. And we saw you about eight months ago. And you're like, I'm up to my elbows in this bloody cookbook. It's finally done. It's a labor of love, I tell you that. It's awesome.

70 easy recipes. Snacks, rice, noodles, dumplings, vegetables, seafood, meat. Are they all easy? Or for you, they might be easy. But what about for me? No. So that was the thing going into this book. I was just like, well, my best friends can't cook to save their life.

So I was just like, if it could be my life goal and mission is to encourage them to cook a well-crafted banquet or a meal that they can feed themselves and nourish their own bodies, that is my life goal done, right? So that's kind of a big reason why I created this book. Did your family, did you come from a family of good cooks yeah interesting upbringing actually can we talk about some of that because you born in fiji yes and your parents owned a noodle factory was that right yeah you can't get any more chinese in that literally kung fu panda um so

yeah i grew up in a noodle factory um and always been surrounded by food my parents have always operated like cafes because they came to new zealand and had like a takeaway store as well as a dairy as well yeah yeah so largely serving pacifica community because that's kind of our background um so we would cook chinese island food quite a lot as well um like our version of like chop suey taro green banana coconut cream stir fries lots of those types of foods my parents kind of just i wouldn't say like they were great cooks but they knew how to like create survival chinese food which is like creating food that they knew a community would want um and that's kind of how chinese food came to be out in

the west actually you know the the first types how chinese food came to be out in the west actually you know the the first types of chinese food that left china and operated and built kind of communities they created things like chop suey because it doesn't exist in chinese cuisine so those types of chinese food was what we call survival food and that's just purely to get money and revenue now of course our winner of masterChef a few years ago. Now, I have forgotten that the dish you went on was a seafood dessert. Now, those are things that wouldn't normally go together. Yeah. I write about it in the book as well. And I talk about how existing as a person of diaspora and not living in a box of rules and tradition, you're able to just do anything that you want and not have boundaries. And of rules and tradition. You're able to just do anything that you want

and not have boundaries, you know? And I think creating a seafood dessert is exactly that. So was it like an oyster pair of loaves? What did you roll with? Instead of kiwi fruit, you're putting oysters on top, muscles. Yeah, it was kombu ice cream, which is the type of seaweed. And then I made like a nori meringue, which is another type of seaweed.

I used sea salt, random things random things well you're very creative i mean you became uh really popular during lockdown you're in a quarantine hotel and you sort of made the dishes that you were given from the hotel sort of recreated them into something a bit more special i guess they look like prison food but then you you turn them into masterpieces yeah yeah it looked great um it tasted the same yeah i mean um it took 20 minutes to play each one so it was stone cold as well um very cool sam low modern chinese the book is out now uh now also you're very creative when it comes to making a coffee art as well as watching some of those on your instagram as well you can do uh you

know silver ferns and you can also do yeah what you call we'll probably have to beat this out the coccino yeah the iconic um i'm actually quite known for that in the coffee industry i didn't know that you could create uh this thing on it you know a coffee you know when you're making it yeah until i did i didn't know that too um Yeah, so I spent 13 years in the specialty coffee industry. And yeah, in 2013 and 2015, I represented New Zealand on the world stage in the World Latte Art Competition. Did you bust out the casino in that one or not?

No, because I really wanted to win. That's the other thing. Did you win the world burst? No, the World Latte Art. I was ranked sixth in the world in 2013 out of, I think, 50 countries. Wow. Yeah, so I spent my time in coffee. What we watched on your Instagram, the C*** Pacino being created in it,

is it's a masterpiece. Hey, Sam Lowe, Modern Chinese, congratulations on it. We know how hard you've worked on it. Go out and get it. And actually, if you head across to our social media hits breakfast, we're going to give away a copy with Sam right now. You can win that.