Junda Khoo has fond memories of his first year in Australia. He was just 16 when he and his younger brother moved from Malaysia to Sydney to study and live in the city on their own. Their parents organised a unit in Hurstville for the boys and enrolled them in high school nearby.
“It was pretty empowering, no one telling you what to do. I was forced to grow up, take care of my brother. We had fun,” says the chef and restaurateur behind Malaysian restaurant group Ho Jiak.
They also had to feed themselves. Their budget didn’t stretch to takeaways, so each week the brothers walked to the shops and lugged home enough groceries to last seven days. Stovetop attempts at cooking were often a failure, but Khoo had a backup: a rice cooker he’d packed in his suitcase. It’s an appliance that to this day he deems so essential it gets a special section in his new cookbook, Ho Jiak: A Taste of Malaysia.
“I wasn’t a chef; I was a teenager who didn’t know how to cook. I tried to cook on the stove and kept screwing shit up. Things came out edible in the rice cooker,” Khoo tells Broadsheet.
That rice cooker saved the brothers from eating packets of instant ramen for every meal, and Khoo quickly learned that things other than rice could be made in it.
“There are so many functions. You can steam, cook soup, braise, make pasta sauce. We used to make hot pot in the rice cooker. Put the soup base in and keep it turned on.”
Although he has great respect for food cooked from scratch, Khoo says when people are time poor, easy meals made with the help of technology are lifesavers.
“I work six days a week, and on my day off I cook. I want to do something simple, so I have more time to play with my kids. Often, I make chicken rice in the rice cooker. You put the rice at the bottom, top it with chicken marinated in salt, oyster sauce and sesame oil, then add the water. When it’s finished, the chicken is cooked, and the rice has absorbed the chicken essence. Add Asian vegetables and let the residual steam cook the vegetables.”
Khoo only has a couple of rules for rice-cooker cooking. Buy a high-quality rice cooker if you can afford it – Tiger or Cuckoo are good brands. And while jasmine rice from Coles or Woolworths is fine, he finds Thai jasmine rice is the best quality. As for the cardinal rule that you must rinse the rice thoroughly before adding the cooking water, Khoo doesn’t bother.
“Mostly because I’m lazy. If you don’t wash the rice, it will be a bit stickier, but it’s not that much of a difference – a bit of starch won’t kill you.”
Junda Khoo’s cookbook, Ho Jiak: A Taste of Malaysia ($55), is published by Hardie Grant Books. It’s available from January 31.
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