Hungry and in a hurry? Adam Liaw’s ‘absurdly simple’ noodles will save the day

Ramen, butter chicken and pad thai may be some of our most beloved restaurant dishes across Australia, but when it comes to what people actually eat at home across Asia, you’re likely to find simpler, more wholesome dishes at the family dinner table.

Instead, you might enjoy a nutritious bowl of pork and vegetable miso soup such as tonjiru in Japan, or a serve of salt-grilled fish called shioyaki. Families in northern India grow up with khichdi, a seasoned rice and lentil dish. Or in Thailand, rad na moo (rice noodles with pork gravy), a dish of Chinese origin similar to hor fun, is a popular comfort food.

“The difficulty for those of us interested in cooking new cuisines is that home cooking is hard to come by,” Liaw says in his new cookbook, Asian Home Cooking.

“In a restaurant, you simply order, eat and pay for a meal. To experience home cooking, you need to be invited to someone’s home. And even then, it is likely to be for a special event or dinner party, where the food is elevated beyond what might ordinarily be served.”

Liaw’s new recipe collection goes far beyond takeaway favourites, showing the breadth and diversity of Asian cuisines and everyday meals that feed more than half the world’s population across the world’s largest continent.

“My aim with this book is to share the kinds of dishes that ordinary home cooks throughout Asia prepare every day. By choosing to try these recipes, you can be sure you are making something that has been successfully executed by tens of thousands of home cooks before you.”

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Here, Liaw shares two recipes from his new cookbook: a simple and speedy noodle dish, and a popular summer eggplant dish from Hangzhou.

This dish from Shaanxi in Northwestern China is a lifesaver for quick home cooking. Using dried noodles is incredibly easy, but this same dish can also be found in simple handmade noodle shops in Shaanxi under the name “biang biang” noodles, an onomatopoeic reference to the sound made when hand-pulled noodles slap against the bench during the stretching process. The hot oil releases the flavour of the sauces and aromatics for an absurdly simple dish that is ready in minutes.

Many versions of this popular summer dish from Hangzhou suggest frying the eggplant (aubergine) in hot oil to preserve the bright purple hue of the skin, but steaming is a healthier and easier method for home cooking. If you prefer, cook your eggplants the old Hangzhou way by steaming them in your pot of rice as it cooks, and then tearing them into pieces by hand rather than cutting them into batons.

This is an edited extract from Asian Home Cooking by Adam Liaw, published by Hardie Grant Books, RRP $65. Photography by David Loftus.

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