Every team has that one person who seems to have a superpower. At RecipeTin, that’s Goh – our resident tech wizard and, unofficially, king of world food recipe development. He also happens to be my younger brother!
Goh is the reason all things IT hum along smoothly across RecipeTin Eats, RecipeTin Meals, and RecipeTin Japan. He’s been working with me since 2017, previous to this, he worked in corporate IT, running the complex systems that keep entire organisations functioning. Which, let’s be honest, was the perfect training ground for managing the daily chaos of RecipeTin!
While he’s the brains behind everything IT in the RecipeTin world, he’s equally obsessive about food. He’s the kind of person who will try his hand at Thomas Keller’s butter-poached lobster, tediously pick crab meat for from-scratch ravioli, can read and understand menus in 12 different languages. He famously spent most of his twenties saving to dine at a fancy restaurant once a year.
His favourite sport is hunting down Sydney’s best hole-in-the-wall joints (his live food map is a thing of legend), and he plans overseas travel itineraries mostly around eating opportunities. He’s also the guy who unapologetically balances all this appreciation of beautiful food with an equally profound appreciation of the Golden Arches and the work of Colonel Sanders.😅
When it comes to traditional recipes of the world, Goh is my go-to for fact-checking, tasting, or developing more challenging recipes entirely from scratch. Dishes like Birria Tacos, Falafel, Focaccia, Fried Chicken (naturally!) and Persian Lamb Shanks. He’s also our resident curry aficionado, and the creator of reader Indian favourites like Lamb Roganjosh, Chicken Tikka Masala, and Goan Fish Curry as well all of our classic, made-from-scratch Thai Curries – red, green, yellow and Panang.
Goh and I have the same philosophy when it comes to recipe development for iconic dishes. A recent example is Filipino Pork Adobo. Knowing I’d been wanting to share “our perfect Adobo” for years, he ate his way through countless versions when he recently visited the Philippines, then more here in Sydney (some so unappealing they were almost educational – sauces too thick, too sour, too sweet, meat too dry).
Those less-than-perfect meals shaped exactly what we didn’t want, and it didn’t take long for Goh to nail a version that was everything we did want – savoury, balanced, fall-apart tender pork, and a sauce just intense enough.
The real fun is always in the development process – heated WhatsApp debates, shuttling samples between houses, rushing over a freshly made batch because “you have to try it while it’s hot!”, and lengthy arguments about sauce reduction (“Can a sauce be too intense?” – yes there is such a thing, we decided) and really, is shoulder the best cut to use?? (Yes, we agreed, pork neck cooks a little too quickly for our liking).
It’s that mix of Goh’s technical precision, culinary curiosity, and love of flavour that makes him so good at what he does – that, plus the fact that he is basically always eating, or cooking, or talking about what he has cooked and eaten, or what he’s planning to cook or eat.
Truly.
It never fails to amaze me how much cooking and eating one human can get through in a week!