Canadian chef Roger Mooking’s unique style of cooking involves the use of spices from all over the world. He chats with Shrabasti Mallik about his diverse ancestry that has influenced his culinary skills
If music be the food of love, play on,” said Shakespeare and chef Roger Mooking followed the words of the bard to the exact letter. All those who are die-hard fans of this renowned Canadian chef would know that before Mooking donned the chef’s hat he lived his musical dreams as a rapper of the 90s Tony awardee Canadian band Bass is Bass where he called himself MC Mystic.
The host of two cooking shows Man with Food and Everyday Exotic did not face tough time juggling between his passions. “I used to think that I was crazy. I thought that I would turn off a part of my brain and turn on another part of my brain to manage music and cooking. Then one day I realised that it is all entertainment and the day I realised that, everything came together.
Think about it, if you go to a restaurant, it’s a form of entertainment, when you watch a TV show, read a cook book or listen to music, it is all entertainment. The day I realised that it was all entertainment and there were different branches, I felt that I was not crazy anymore it’s just about how you frame it,” said Mooking during his masterclass at Tamra in Shangri-la’s-Eros Hotel.
Over the years Mooking has developed his unique style of cooking that uses spices from different corners around the world. For his masterclass he chose to make something as simple as lamb kebab with tamarind sauce and rice with black eyed peas. His affinity towards black pepper was evident by the way he used it in the sauce, in the marinade of the kebab as well as in the rice.
“I prefer black pepper more than white pepper,” he said, “When I am cooking a dish I want the aroma of different ingredients to stand out. Black pepper allows that. The smell of white pepper is very overpowering.”
The chef said that there is a method to madness, even when cooking, as he poured almost a cup of grapefruit juice into the tamarind sauce. “I love cooking with citrus fruits. Any flavour, that you add citrus juices to, comes alive and grapefruit has a specific flavour that compliments tamarind,” he explained. For lamb kebabs, Mooking used wooden skewers soaked in water and along with meat pieces and onion slices he used a ‘honk’ of mint leaves in every layer.
“Mint leaves in kebabs is not traditional but it is something that I picked up during my travels across the world. Mint adds a lot of freshness to kebabs. little portion of the leaves which are outside will be burnt while the inside will cook and release its oil and add a minty flavour to kebabs,” he explained.
His versatility and knack for experimenting stems from the fact that Mooking comes from an ancestry which boasts of influences from China, the Caribbean islands and Africa. His grandfather came from China and landed in the Caribbean. In Trinidad, the Caribbean is the most cultural and diverse of all the islands.
He shared, “We moved to Canada when I was five and that place, too, was very culturally diverse. But when we moved there was a great Ukrainian population so I tried my hand in those kind of foods — paroski, cabbage rolls and different types of sausages. My mother was always very curious when it came to cooking.
So I would come home from school and there’d be an Ukrainian grandmother in my kitchen trying to teach my mother how to make a traditional Ukrainian dish and some days it’d be an Indian grandmother trying to teach my mother how to roll a chapati. So I learned most things about cooking because my parents were curious about it, too. I was exposed to a lot of different cultures and cuisines right from the beginning and I travel a lot. What I do now is just an extension of what I was doing in my childhood.”
Mooking has been trained by chefs of different cuisines and he concludes that all through the world people follow different methods of making the same food. He shared that when he was training with a French chef he was taught to make a stock by letting it simmer on a low flame and then straining it gently. “When I was training with a Chinese chef years later I got yelled at for letting the stock simmer.
In China, they make this special kind of stock where you roll the stock hard and you should not let it simmer. It is totally different, combating and contradictory information. So I realised that the more I move around I will come across different ways in which people cook. You have to treat every dish in a separate manner,” he explained.
Even though he is a world renowned chef and has travelled around the world, Mooking believes that cooking is a never ending learning process. Every country he visits is like a treasure chest for him. The more you start to learn about a region, you realise how regional and territorial everything is, he said. “I can come to India and spend my entire life trying to learn different regional cuisine here.
You can go to Thailand and you will get different flavours in different parts and in the Caribbean what you get in one island, you will not get that in the other. Italy and France are like that, too,” he concluded.