Cooking up with chef Will Meyrick

For food enthusiasts, living in Singapore is truly a culinary heaven for more than one reason. The food culture is so strong and prominent that it makes it quite hard to keep up with all the festivals, restaurant and bar openings, or guest-chefs visiting the island.

This time we can thank World Gourmet Summit for bringing a panel of chefs, as diverse as michelin star Christophe Muller to self-proclaimed street food chef Will Meyrick. The organiser has succeeded in making our decision even harder when it came to picking our favourite events to attend.

One of a kind chef

The mouth-watering WGS program left us with no doubt when our eyes fell on the name of chef Will Meyrick. Excited by his unique cooking philosophy and constant research to revive lost ingredients and recipes, we headed to At-Sunrice culinary school to get our hands-on experience with three of his preferred dishes.

Prestigious Scottish seafood

For his masterclass, chef Will combined his Scottish roots with the country he fell for over two decades ago, Indonesia, and his love for ‘warungs‘ and premium items. To top off the whole experience, we were given the opportunity to cook with seafood from the chef’s native country, which featured a farmed Scottish salmon, cod and blue lobster. Essentially the kind of seafood that’s usually served in exclusive restaurants were on trays waiting for us, simple amateurs, to cook them. So here we were, dressed in our aprons, ready to follow any instructions and advice the chef would share with us.

Celebrating Indonesia’s cooking history

The first dish showcased was an Indonesian-style rujack salad with Scottish salmon. We were all ears during the demo as chef Will explained how to cut and pan-sear properly, deep-fry, and most importantly whip up the rujack dressing. The result was an incredible taste of freshness and crunchy fruits, with salmon that simply melted in your mouth.

We then watched him prepare a still live ‘stir-fried lobster with ginger flower, young coconut, yellow bean and curry leaf’. The pressure was on, as the Scottish blue lobster is revered as the world’s finest. When preparing this dish, the most important bit is to wait for all the flavours to be released before moving on to the next step. If oil is used sparingly in Western cuisine, in Asian cooking it actually allows the aromas to explode.

For our last recipe ‘Acehnese fish curry of Scottish cod’, chef Will told us more about his travels in Sri Lanka and how the influences are similar to Indonesia. Most of us discovered the asami sunti and asami candy, a dried sour fruit that is key to the dish. Another trick was to figure out the right balance. Indonesian cooking involves seasoning with salt and sugar, so if like me your hand was a bit heavy with the oil, you can correct it by adding a generous pinch of salt and sugar. His last recommendation was on how to pick a cod. “Look for a firm flesh, it should hold during the cooking,” he advised. This plate was a hit!

Before leaving, chef Will Meyrick gave us more words of wisom, “cook with your senses.”

So, if reading this article has sufficiently whet your appetite, click here to try your hand at chef Will Meyrick’s recipes of rujack salad, Acehnese fish curry and stir-fried lobster.

Céline Manoukian

Photo credit: At Sunrice