Yahoo Lifestyle 
Adam Liaw and Poh Ling Yeow team up for brand new project: 'Really proud'
EXCLUSIVE: Adam Liaw spills on his exciting new adventure with Poh Ling Yeow.
They’re two of the most beloved personalities to come from the MasterChef franchise, and now Adam Liaw and Poh Ling Yeow have teamed up for an exciting new project.
Two years on from their popular series Adam and Poh’s Malaysia in Australia, the duo have released Adam & Poh's Great Australian Bites on SBS where they travel across the country in search of Australia’s national dish.
“The premise is very simple: what is Australia's national dish?” Adam tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “We think about other countries and other cuisines and we kind of forget that Australian cuisine is amazing, firstly, and also completely unique.
“We have dishes here that we don't get anywhere else in the world and we have ingredients here that you don’t get anywhere else in the world. And for some reason, maybe it’s cultural cringe or otherwise, we tend to look outside.
“We understand French cuisine and we understand Chinese cuisine and we understand Indian cuisine, and then when somebody asks, ‘What’s Australian cuisine?’, we're like, ‘Ah, well, not really sure’. So we just really wanted to give people a good answer to that question. Here’s what makes Australian cuisine great and here's what Australia's national dish is.”
RELATED:
MasterChef's Laura Sharrad shares how she made a career from the show
Former MasterChef judge Gary Mehigan reflects on shock exit: 'Inevitable'
MasterChef winner Brent Draper reveals plans with $250,000 prize money
In addition to visiting stunning locations on their cross-country road trip, the new series also features Adam and Poh meeting with various influential Australians - including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
“Obviously, any series where you get to chat to the Prime Minister about food is probably a pretty good one,” he remarks. “We spoke with people like Maggie Beer and Pamela Clark, who wrote the Women's Weekly children's birthday cake book, which is an absolute classic.
“It's really great to see the faces that have been involved in shaping Australian food. The impact that a lot of these people have had on food has been enormous.”
'I love working with Poh'
Adam went on to share that he hopes Great Australian Bites helps reshape the way Australians view their own style of cooking after years of it being somewhat misrepresented on other TV shows.
“We look at the dishes of Australian cuisine that are sometimes overlooked because we spend a lot of time looking at fancy chef-y food,” he says.
“These days on MasterChef it's very, very, very fancy. But Great Australian Bites is the exact opposite of that. We talk about kebabs, we talk about spaghetti bolognese, we talk about roast lamb. We are looking at the everyday food that everyday people are making every day. To me, that’s what Australian food is. It's not fancy chef food.”
SHOP:
Adam is also hopeful that he and Poh, who have been friends for over a decade since they competed on back-to-back seasons of MasterChef, continue to work together in the near future.
“We get along really well, I think we come across on screen the same way as we are in the car,” he remarks.
“Sometimes when I look at the edits of the series I’m like, oh I forgot the camera was on then! We were just having a chat and that’s what ends up in the series. I love working with Poh.”
Great Australian Bites airs Tuesdays at 8pm AEST on SBS Food and SBS On Demand
Never miss a thing. Sign up to Yahoo Lifestyle’s daily newsletter.
Or if you have a story idea, email us at lifestyle.tips@yahooinc.com.
