In the middle of a barn, on the edges of a farm on Sydney’s south-western fringe, chef, author and TV producer Adam Liaw is biting into an Anzac biscuit.
“Whoarrrh,” he says in delight. “Excellent crunch.”
I take a biscuit too, freshly baked by contestants on the ABC’s new seven-part cooking show Recipe of the Year. The show is being filmed all around us at handmade wooden benchtops stationed against a backdrop of green pastureland beyond the barn’s wide open doors. Liaw takes my phone and films me breaking the golden, oat-flecked biscuit in two.
“Good?” he says.
It is. Perfectly crisp and, after a bite, nicely chewy. I explain my love for Anzac biscuits that are more chewy than crispy, but Ellice Schrader, a judge on the series and a member of the Country Women’s Association of NSW, overhears.
“It needs to snap,” she says of the biscuit being broken apart. She also confirms that the CWA advises Anzac biscuits must never, ever, be called “cookies”.
“Ellice is formidable,” Liaw says. It’s a label he also gives her in the series’ first episode to which Schrader replies: “I’m a pussycat.”
Recipe of the Year features 10 home cooks, drawn from 20 hopefuls in the show’s first episode, competing to achieve Australia’s “recipe of the year”. Hosted by Liaw and actor and food-lover Pia Miranda, it’s created and produced by i8 Studio, the Sydney production company Liaw runs with co-executive producer and director Josh Martin.
Liaw and Martin, whose company is known for shows such as Tonight at the Museum, The Cook Up with Adam Liaw and Adam & Poh’s Great Australian Bites, say this series is a departure from the usual competitive cooking TV show. Not only do contestants bring their own recipes to cook, they share the meals cooked in each episode around a table together.
“It’s a really familiar space for a lot of viewers, and we’re genuinely trying our hardest to do things that are different,” Liaw says. “Not just for the sake of being different, but because we felt there were important reasons to make the show feel accessible and more like cooking feels at home.”
Those reasons include the current cost of living, time constraints for everyday cooks and how and why people cook for themselves, friends and family. Unlike shows like MasterChef Australia (which Liaw won in 2010) or My Kitchen Rules, Recipe of the Year’s focus is on recipes rather than cooking.
“[Australians] love recipes,” Liaw says. “We love them in the newspaper, online and in books. We were really thinking through what’s the experience with somebody when they’re making a recipe? And, when they choose to cook something, is it a recipe that makes sense for the purpose that is being set for it?
“Then, when you actually make it, what’s the process of eating? There aren’t many circumstances in home cooking where three members of your family stand there in front of you and taste it, give stern expressions and then give you feedback. Even though it is a competition, there’s also an atmosphere of home cooking on the show around the way we instruct the challengers and the way we judge.”
“Everybody’s opinion on food matters – not just the expert.”Adam Liaw, on the judging criteria for his new series.
Pia Miranda, a passionate cook and food lover, says making the show inspired great warmth and conviviality. “It’s one of the best experiences I’ve ever had, and I’m not just saying that because it’s about to come out,” she says. “It really was.
“Everyone who was there just had a great time … It felt like a fourth or fifth season, not like the first season of a TV show. It was a real celebration of life.”
The show’s location also resulted in a passing parade of animal life beyond the barn’s doors. “We had cows,” she says. “We had kangaroos. There were deer and beautiful, beautiful birds. Adam’s so cute: every time kangaroos went past, he got misty-eyed. He gets so excited by kangaroos. We had to stop and just look at them.”
Josh Martin believes the show’s focus on recipes, along with the contestants’ stories about their recipes’ origins and histories, will inspire a broad range of viewers.
“We love MasterChef. We love Bake Off … But we thought, let’s just get back to real food that people cook.”Josh Martin, executive producer and director of Recipe of the Year
“Adam and I have made a lot of food shows,” Martin says. “And don’t get me wrong: we love MasterChef, we love Bake Off. Six hours for a challenge to do something? That’s great. But we thought, let’s just get back to real food that people cook. In the second episode, the very first challenge they do is make a sandwich. But it really works.”
Recipe of the Year’s format features three challenges: the blue ribbon, the gold ribbon and a feature recipe section. The first is about creativity; the second focuses on precision and is judged by the CWA, with recipes ranging from a jam roll to scones and Anzac biscuits; the third is a recipe brought in by competitors.
Across the series, themes include comfort food, budget cooking, the big barbecue, weekend brunch recipes and more.
“The final challenge is the only one with stakes on it,” Martin says. “They all bake a dish and at the end, rather than the judges tasting and judging like a lot of other shows, everybody sits around the table and votes for their favourite to least favourite. Then we tally the votes. Because everybody’s opinion on food matters – not just the expert.”
Today, contestants are getting ready to bake more Anzac biscuits. They stand at benchtops fitted with ovens, cooktops and kitchen equipment while crew members bustle around them.
Rustic wooden walls display retro tea towels, souvenir teaspoon displays, hanging copper pans and ceramic jugs filled with eucalyptus and banksia branches. Contestants have been given tea towels printed with the Anzac biscuit recipe (“Bake at 175 degrees for 15 to 20 mins or until golden brown”).
The contestants – who have a wide variety of ages, experience and cultural and geographical backgrounds – include a 19-year-old aspiring chef who experiments passionately with cannoli, and a builder from Sydney celebrating his mother’s cooking. There’s also a Malaysian-born home cook sharing flavours of her homeland, and a teacher who, expressing the importance of connecting with family via food, shares her late mother’s recipes.
Schrader, decked out in pearls and a total natural in front of the cameras, judges the gold ribbon category with warmth, generosity and strict CWA criteria. As with food competitions at major Australian agricultural shows, judging cakes, slices, biscuits and other baked goods is not done lightly.
In one episode, she wields a tape measure to assess the talents of a scone. Contestants are told that a good jam roll must have “no cracks, no skin missing and a neat roll”. Schrader slices one open to show a perfect, evenly layered swirl of jam inside the sponge.
“Ellice was the biggest surprise for us,” Martin says. “She had never done television before in her life and really has not much interest in it. But she was such a natural, such a joy, and at times quite scary. She’s like the Margaret Pomeranz of cooking, or a Simon Cowell-esque role. It’s hard feedback, but done with a completely different approach.”
Martin also applauds the ABC for supporting a show with an original format like this.
“A lot of the main shows that we have on air in Australia are imported formats,” he says. “There are very few original formats and that’s fine, they’re popular. But the ability for Australian IP and ideas to be created here, and then, if successful, exported to other countries … that’s what the ABC should be doing, that’s what all our cultural institutions should be doing: supporting Australian IP.
“I’d love to see a UK version or an American version or a Japanese version, or whatever it might be, of the show.”
What Martin loves most about Recipe of the Year is its blend of modern Australia: diverse food, shared community, nostalgia, creativity. He calls it intentionally analogue and an antidote to today’s AI-saturated world.
“I feel like people want to try something new in the kitchen or mix up their repertoire,” he says. “And this show gives them ideas that are achievable.”
Recipe of the Year premieres 7.30pm, October 11 on the ABC and ABC iview.
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
