Building vegetarian dishes with Asian flavors and techniques

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Looking to Yotam Ottolenghi for inspiration, Pamelia Chia wanted to change the way people saw vegetables. Photo by Gold and Grit Photography.

Meat was a luxury for Pamelia Chia's grandparents. The Singapore-raised chef recalls how older generations enjoyed chicken and rice on payday because it was the only time they could afford it. How times have changed. By the 1990s, when she grew up, seafood, meat, and dairy were on every dinner table and in almost every dish. When Chia moved to Australia, she grappled with the effects of climate change, seeing brush fires up close. She changed her diet but was hesitant to compromise flavor, texture, and satisfaction. She turned to Asian cuisines and techniques to make vegetables taste delicious.

When Chia started her journey into a plant-rich diet, she found that most cookbooks were written by vegetarians for vegetarians. She wasn't interested in fake meat or soy-based products. Yotam Ottolenghi inspired her to reach out to 24 chefs, adapting their recipes for a vegetable-forward book, Plantasia: A Vegetarian Cookbook Through Asia.


The key to this salad is to smack open the cucumbers with the back of a cleaver so they absorb the seasonings. Photo by Gold and Grit Photography.



Chia builds dishes around flavor, accent, technique, and texture. Take her hot button mushrooms by Gayan Pieris, a Sri Lankan chef living in Australia. The recipe riffs on the popular Sri Lankan dish of hot buttered calamari. Hand-shredded mushrooms are added to a thin spice batter then deep-fried, creating caramelization using kecap manis (a sweet soy sauce) and ketchup.


For her book "Plantasia," Pamelia Chia reached out to 24 different Asian chiefs to compile vegetable-forward recipes. Photo courtesy of Singapore Noodles.