Creative Recipes, Delicious in Taste

Now in its fifth year, the annual Best Home Cook contest returned with a showdown between young culinary students and experienced home cooks. Together with editors from The Malaysian Women’s Weekly, Shape and Jelita, this year’s participants got experimental with their fjord trout recipes.

- EENA HOUZYAMA

In November last year, the Best Home Cook 2019 contest took place at the Cooking House in Symphony Square, Petaling Jaya, where seven semi-finalists challenged each other with their best Norwegian Fjord Trout recipe. Just like the year before, the top semi-finalists would enter the final round and be paired with editors to compete in cooking a dish inspired by one of the recipes on our website, herinspirasi.com.

Light Up Your Stoves

Once the introductions were made by Daphne Iking, our host for the day, participants proceeded to their own stations to prepare their ingredients. The seven semi-finalists cooking up a storm were Aldora Velonia, Braveena, Raja Zahirah, Reena Gan, Shahriar Naghshbandi, Spencer Wong, and 2018’s Best Home Cook, Honey Chan. Each presented the judges with their personal recipe using Norwegian Fjord Trout and spices from McCormick. Judges for the first round included celebrity cook Ili Sulaiman, Chef Jimmy Chok – Ambassador Chef of Norwegian Seafood Council, Eena Houzyama – editor-in-chief of Her World and The Malaysian Women’s Weekly, Anida Salwani – editor of Jelita, and Jay Jayaraj – deputy editor of Shape.

Once the timer started , all the semi-finalists got busy prepping their dishes, which ranged from pan-seared to tandoori trout. A fragrant aroma soon filled the kitchen. Judges walked around asking participants to explain more about their dish and the inspiration behind it.

Round One Concludes

One by one completed dishes made their way to the judges’ table. Dish after dish, the judges were impressed with the creative presentation and interesting flavour combinations. Contestants were judged based on their creativity, innovation and taste of each dish. Once every dish had completed the taste test, scores were tabulated and the results were brought in.