Celebrating neighbourhood cuisine
Chef Peter Kuruvita shares useful cooking tips on his Coastal Kitchen show. Dennis Chua writes
AUSTRALIAN-Sri Lankan celebrity chef Peter Kuruvita is less well-known than Jamie Oliver or Anthony Bourdain.
But he’s a pleasure to watch anyway, as he celebrates the joys of preparing neighbourhood foods, in his weekly culinary series, Peter Kuruvita’s Coastal Kitchen.
The calm and laidback chef, who calls himself an enthusiastic foodie and traveller, gets the best ingredients from the neighbourhood market to whip up scrumptious, original dishes in his spick-and-span kitchen.
Having previously presented cookery shows that featured recipes from his ancestral home, Sri Lanka, Kuruvita is now based in Noosa, Queensland, and uses his series to celebrate local produce and flavours from Australia’s north-eastern Sunny State.
Each episode has a different theme, and as a passionate advocate of Aboriginal Australian empowerment, the chef always has an instalment about indigenous foods or “bush tucker”, tips on selecting quality seafood and farm produce, plus the health benefits of various fish, fruits and vegetables he uses.
While he loves his country of residence, Australia, Kuruvita remains passionate about Sri Lankan cuisine as well, and does his best to fuse them with delicious results.
His original creations, which merge the best of East and West, include dhal soup, egg curry pho, and clams with Sri Lankan XO sauce.
Kuruvita is a firm believer in lifelong learning, and shares his plans to devise new dishes with viewers.
For instance, he has great fun making goat cheese, learns the tricky art of beekeeping from a friend, and even enrols in a tempe-making course after falling in love with the traditional Javanese soyabean cake and its nutritional benefits.
The chef’s handy tips and tricks in his cooking demonstrations are always a joy to watch because he delivers them in clear, precise layman terms. For instance, he reminds viewers that shellfish must always be soaked overnight in order to remove excess sand, and purchased fish fillets should always be opaque with firm flesh, vibrant skin and the smell of mineral water.
PASTIMES INSPIRE RECIPES
The 54-year-old chef who was born in the United Kingdom grew up in Sri Lanka where he was introduced to cooking by his grandmother and mother. It was this and a strong sense of family that inspired him to pursue food as a career.
Moving to Sydney, Australia when he was 10, he became an apprentice chef after completing high school and his first job was in the kitchen of a seafood restaurant in southern Sydney.
By the time he was 20, Kuruvita became a chef in the one Michelin star restaurant Rue St Jacques in London, and since then he has worked all over the world in hotels and restaurants such as the Four Seasons Hotel, Philadelphia in the US and Hayman Island Resort, Sydney.
From the series, we get to learn a lot about the chef’s favourite foods, pastimes and family members. Kuruvita believes that celebrity chefs should not only teach fans how to cook good food, but also introduce them to some of their pastimes which indi- rectly inspire original recipes.
He loves the Vietnamese noodle dish pho which he first encountered in Ho Chi Minh City in 1996, and as soon as he got home from his back-packing holiday, he busied himself in creating his very own version of it.
He even grew Thai basil, an important ingredient in the noodle dish, in his own garden.
Kuruvita is close to his Austrian-born mother, Lilly, and describes her as a huge influence on his cooking.
Not only did she master Sri Lankan cooking very fast, she also encouraged him to learn it, and it was this early exposure to the kitchen that made him realise becoming a chef was his calling in life.
Kuruvita also shares with fans the reasons why he loves his current home, Noosa in Queensland’s Sunshine Coast region. It is a good place for him to surf, it is relatively crime-free and tidy, the schools are excellent and the airport is close to his house.
As for his projects, he has announced that he will be visiting Tehran in Iran, to learn more about the country’s culture of fine dining and tea. He is also working with a tea brand to open some tea lounges around the world.
Kuruvita’s five must-haves in his kitchen are a mortar and pestle, a coconut scraper, an iron skillet, quality sharp knives and an outdoor charcoal barbecue set.
Must-haves are a mortar and pestle, a coconut scraper, an iron skillet, quality sharp knives and an outdoor charcoal barbecue set.
Chef Peter Kuruvita