SBS Food has been featuring some of Australia’s top chefs and cooks as part of our Cooks and their Books series. Each week we focus on a different cuisine and bring you a selection of recipes to try at home.


Greg Malouf - executive chef at MoMo restaurant in Melbourne and author of Saha and Turquoise

Greg Malouf has fond childhood memories of family gatherings in the crowded kitchen of his grandmother’s Melbourne home, where he would watch on curiously as the women expertly prepared aromatic traditional Arabic dishes from their homeland.

It was his fascination with the culinary ceremony of these occasions, as much as his capacious appetite, that eventually led him into the kitchen professionally...

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Channa Dassanayaka - chef, yoga instructor and author of Sri Lankan Flavours

Channa Dassanayaka likes the word healing. This is perhaps unsurprising, given that the Sri Lankan chef is also a Buddhist yoga instructor whose claims to fame include cooking for the Dalai Lama and 200 monks when the world leader last visited Australia.

He believes that chefs have ‘an obligation to be healers’ and takes his spiritual approach to food very seriously...

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Manuela Darling-Gannser - amateur cook and author of Under The Olive Tree and Winter In The Alps

If you ask Manuela Darling-Gannser where her passion for food comes from, she’ll tell you it runs in her blood - all the way, perhaps, back to her great-grandfather who was a famous foodie and restaurateur in southern Switzerland more than 120 years ago.

While she was brought up in the Swiss lakeside city of Lugano, the family's cultural connections were somewhat stronger with nearby Italy than with their homeland...

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Hayley Smorgon, Gaye Weeden and Natalie King – homecooks and co-authors of Cooking From Memory

The Jewish Diaspora in Australia is celebrated in a book co-authored by three Melbourne-based Jewish women. Cooking from Memory opens with the story of Esther Abrahams, one of seven Jews aboard the First Fleet.

Jews have played a part in the history of Australian settlement, and the nation’s adopted culinary habits from the very beginning...

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Teage Ezard – Executive Chef and owner of Ezard and Gingerboy restaurants in Melbourne, and author of ezard: Contemporary Australian Food

Even as a kid, Teage Ezard had an unusually mature palate, regularly tucking into exotic delicacies like cocks’ combs, frogs legs and seaweed at the countless new restaurants his foodie father would take the family out to on weekends.

Making it through a variety of humbling hospitality jobs relatively unscathed, Ezard went on to undertake a demanding but ultimately rewarding apprenticeship with renowned chef Hermann Schneider…

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Rosemary Brissenden - amateur cook, expert on Southeast Asian Food and author of the classic cookbook South East Asian Food

Rosemary Brissenden first travelled to Asia in 1957 as part of a student delegation from Melbourne University, spending 3 months in Java and Bali.

Over this period she lived with local families in their homes and ate Indonesian food all the time. This early trip sparked her Southeast Asian food fascination, and the further she travelled the more fascinated she became…

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Martin Boetz – executive chef and coowner of Longrain restaurants in Sydney and Melbourne, and author of Longrain: Modern Thai Food

SBS Food catches up with Martin Boetz of Sydney and Melbourne’s legendary Longrain restaurants.

Get inside the head of this award-winning chef and restaurateur as he shares his food philosophies and offers a refreshing and thoroughly modern take on Thai cuisine...

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