Diana Chan's top tips to bring Asian cooking to your home

Diana Chan prefers eating lunch with a bit of rubbish blowing around, maybe even a glimpse of a rat. Not that the bayside home where she entertains friends every weekend needs cleaning. Rather, for her, Asian cuisine’s “heart and soul” is its street food.

Chan, the 2017 MasterChef winner, is back on our TV screens with a new series of Asia Unplated with Diana Chan, focusing each week on one Asian cuisine. Passionate about them all, her soft spot is the Malaysian street food of her childhood.

Filming the Malaysian episode was disrupted by border closures, requiring a substitute guest chef. Cue cousin Karen Chan.

“Having a family member on the show was quite nostalgic,” Chan says.

Born in Johor Bahru, in the south of the Malay Peninsula, Chan, now 34, moved to Kuala Lumpur at 17 for senior high school. There, her eyes and taste buds were opened to the rich variety of local food.

She tries to be unbiased, praising the food of Hong Kong and others discovered through her show.

“I’ve learned so much, especially from a lot of the chefs that come in,” she enthuses. “There were a couple of episodes [in which] I was a bit unsure [about the cuisine], for example, Cambodian and Laotian. I had not been there, although I’ve travelled extensively throughout Asia. I did a lot of research.”

For the March 11 Laotian food episode with chef Jerry Mai, that meant watching “countless videos” on making traditional spicy sai oua sausage.

The show aims to demystify Asian cuisine with something for everyone: classic dishes, how-tos from chefs teaching more complicated restaurant dishes and explaining ingredients, friends and family offering “simple-to-make, just easy home cooking”.

Chan knows cooking each cuisine’s favourites can be scary to the uninitiated.

“The ones that you find everywhere, but people often don’t make it at home because they think it is too hard, so let’s break it down for them and show them how to do it because it is not that hard.”

Since her MasterChef win Chan has run a seven- month pop-up restaurant, Chanteen in Melbourne, has a frozen dumpling range in supermarkets and is launching a homewares range, inspired by styling her dishes during Melbourne’s lockdown.

“I want to cook beautiful food, but lay it out beautifully and I want people to have the same experience at home as they would in a restaurant.”

Diana’s local favourites

Di Stasio Citta

45 Spring Street, Melbourne

“I love the ambience, beautiful people and the food is consistently good.”

Minamishama

4 Lord Street, Richmond

“My partner Hugh was living in Tokyo for about a year. After eating sushi at a restaurant there I could not eat it anywhere else. But here it’s so good, very close to Tokyo.”

Flower Drum

17 Market Lane, Melbourne

“It’s simple food done well, you just cannot better that.”

France Soir

11-13 Toorak Road, South Yarra

“Old school classic traditional cooking.”

Asia Unplated with Diana Chan season 2 airs Thursdays at 8pm on SBS Food.