Let’s throw it back to the beginning – do you remember where your love for food first came from?
I think anyone who ‘loves food’ always enjoyed eating it first, before they start cooking it. So, the love comes from the people that cook your very first meals. Both my grandmother and my mother were very good cooks, and taught not just what to eat, but how to prepare it – and how to appreciate it more than anything else.

How would you best explain your personal philosophy on food?
I think it can be summed up pretty well by saying there is no correlation between how difficult something is to cook and how good it tastes. I think cooking is much more about the people you’re cooking for, rather than servicing your own ego. So, I hardly ever cook things as a hobby anymore. Like, I don’t go and cook a six-course degustation for my friends just because I can. I certainly enjoy having people over and cooking for my family, but I think my cooking over the last ten years or so has become so much more practical, and I enjoy that so much more than the days when I used to spend a whole day in the kitchen cooking something just to end up with a fancy dinner.

What inspires you?
I think cooking is always in context, whether that context is the people you’re cooking for, or the place that you’re in, or the combination of those, and so i get inspiration from everything really – from walking through the shops and seeing what’s there, or the weather – today it’s quite nice, so I’m already thinking of new things to cook. And then obviously, most of my meals I end up cooking for my wife and children, so they inspire me on a daily basis.

You’ve recently released your latest book, The Zen Kitchen. Can you tell us a little more about what we can expect?
It’s about Japanese home cooking. A lot of us are introduced to new cuisines through restaurant food, so our perception of Japanese food might be just sushi and ramen – things that actual Japanese families at home never really cook. So, particularly with Asian cuisines, our experience as Australians is generally restaurant-style stuff, and we get intimated trying to cook that at home. The Zen Kitchen is just about the kind of food that Japanese people cook at home, which is extremely easy, extremely healthy and very tasty.

Do you have a particular ingredient that you love to cook with at the moment?
There are some great winter cabbages around at the moment, which I really like. Things like cabbages and cauliflower, I think, go really well in winter, so I tend to cook those things quite, well, robustly –  as in, I make sure I get them nice and brown. I don’t think people brown their vegetables enough, because things like cauliflower are full of sugars that you can caramelise and get a really, really good flavour out of.

After a big day, what’s your go-t0 meal you’d most likely cook at home?
Honestly, it’s similar things to what I will be showing at The Kitchens. There’s this idea that you have to spend a lot of time cooking to make tasty things. I actually timed myself for two weeks, every single night, to show much time I spent cooking dinner. I didn’t want to say “you can make a delicious meal in minutes” knowing full well that I can’t. Across the two weeks, I spent 18 minutes on average cooking dinner. So, the demonstrations I am doing at The Kitchens are the kind of things I make at home, like a teriyaki chicken with homemade teriyaki sauce.

What’s one of the greatest lessons you’ve learnt?
To have a sense of humour about things. A lot of people don’t like to try new things in the kitchen, because they think they will fail, or they think they can order it in better. It’s not the end of the world if you stuff it up.

What advice can you give the budding home chefs on the Gold Coast? Without giving too many tips away before you’re on stage at The Kitchens!
The best piece of advice is to keep things simple. We constantly overcomplicate dishes with a million different herbs and spices and it’s completely unnecessary. We just need to focus on a couple of ingredients, treat them really well, and make sure you get the flavour of that ingredient out. There’s no point in buying a really nice bit of beef, and then trying to make it taste like thyme or bayleaf – just make it taste like beef, because beef is a really great flavour. We spend a lot of time thinking about how we’re going to marinade our steaks, and by doing that, we’re actually taking away from that flavour, and end up just tasting burnt marinade. By overcomplicating things, we detract from what we should be focussing on.

You can catch Adam Liaw at The Kitchens at Robina Town Centre this Sunday July 9. Head over here for more info.