Name: Chicken rendang.
Appearance: Brown stuff.
Ingredients: Chicken, coconut milk, lime leaves, lemongrass, chillies, lots of spices ...
Mmmm. Sounds delicious. Oh, it is ... usually. But not on MasterChef a couple of Sundays ago.
The long-running BBC cookery competition, in which John Torode and Gregg Wallace judge the performance of amateur cooks in a series of tasks? That’s right.
I thought people cooked bad food on that all the time? They do. But this time there’s been a miscarriage of justice ... allegedly.
What happened? Well, a British Malaysian contestant called Zaleha Olpin cooked a chicken rendang. Torode and Wallace didn’t like it, and eliminated her.
She knew the risks. What’s the problem? The problem is why they didn’t like it. “The chicken skin isn’t crispy. It can’t be eaten,” Wallace said. “And all the sauce is on the skin I can’t eat.”
I see. “It hasn’t had enough time to cook down and become lovely and soft and fall apart,” Torode added. “Instead the chicken itself is tough and it’s not really flavoursome.”
An open and shut case, surely? Au contraire. Olpin and many of her Malaysian supporters are fighting back. They insist that chicken rendang should be served that way. “I stand by my traditional way of cooking,” she said. And now the Malaysian press have leapt aboard.
So ... are we at war with Malaysia? Not yet. But tensions are running high over Wallace’s complaint that the skin wasn’t crisp, which in truth it never would be in a slow-cooked rendang. The British high commissioner to Malaysia soothingly made this point on Twitter.
Have the judges apologised? Not even a bit. “Brilliant how excited you are all getting,” Torode said.
But isn’t it a bit odd for a Brit and an Australian to tell a Malaysian how to cook her own food? If you think so, here’s a plate of boiled chicken skin. Tuck in.
Thanks, but I just ate. Look, chicken skin is delicious when it’s crisp, and horrible when it’s soft. That’s all Wallace meant. Delicious is what counts for the Masterchef judges.
What about authentic? Oh, people care way too much about all that. In 2016, Jamie Oliver said he got death threats for adding chorizo to paella.
Outrageous! No Spaniard in their right mind would ever … Oh, forget it.
Do say: “Chicken doesn’t get tougher than this!”
Don’t say: “But she carved a tomato into a rose and everything!”
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