A TOUCH OF SCIENCE, A HINT OF FOOD
Bringing to the room with her a spark of happiness and an air of humor, Marleen Ong is a delight to talk to about love, life and everything in between—a few jokes inserted here and there. But that one thing that Marleen is most knowledgeable about? Food.
“I graduated as a fine arts student. Since I always loved cooking, I decided I wanted to pursue a career in the culinary industry.” She explained. Marleen is a chef by profession, having acquired her skills and learned the ways of the kitchen from the prestigious school, The Culinary Institute of America. “Had I known there were existing culinary schools before, I would have gone straight to culinary,” she joked.
But the journey wasn’t all glamor and culinary excellence for Marleen. She started off in her on-the-job training, washing dishes for awhile, making it a routine and learning that everyone has to start from the bottom to make their way to the top in the industry.
Now, Marleen is a culinary genius in her own right with a specialty in molecular gastronomy, a subdiscipline of food science. Molecular gastronomy is all about seeking and investigating the physical and chemical transformations of ingredients that occur while cooking.
A modern style of cooking, this technique takes advantage of many technical innovations. It is also known as multi-sensory cooking, modernist cuisine, culinary physics and experimental cuisine.
Cebu itself has only a handful of chefs specializing in such discipline.
“You’re both a scientist and a chef.” Marleen explained. “It’s fun because you can push the limit of how something is prepared through scientific techniques to make something entirely new yet yummy.”
Taking advantage of this, Marleen has come up with her very own product, putting her skills to good use, creating peanut chips.
DrivemeNuts Peanut Chips is innovation at its finest and something that Chef Marleen is proud of. Created from ground raw peanuts glucose and salt, DrivemeNuts Peanut Chips are thin yet crunchy circle-shaped peanut chips that come in three different flavors, mainly the plain peanut chips, the dark chocolate glazed peanut chips and the white chocolate glazed peanut chips.
Marleen wants to introduce a new type of pasalubong to Cebu, something that can be enjoyed by everyone, a fresh take on what the metro usually has to offer, and using Cebuano products out of the norm.
With innovations and ideas ready for her to be discovered, Marleen is changing the game in Cebu by playing with both science and food to her advantage, giving us a breath of fresh air and a taste of new gastronomic delights, something that Cebu has been eagerly waiting for.