Six Adam Liaw Recipes to Up the Ante on Midweek Meals

Forty-minute scotch fillet tacos
Tomato and prawn risotto
Carbonara fried rice
Extra-crispy tomato-sauce chicken
Ssamjang chicken wrapped in lettuce leaves with nori
Tofu doughnuts
Adam Liaw

The cook, author and TV host has a well-deserved reputation for crafting tasty meals you can put together on the fly. Here we have a 10-minute “carbonara” fried rice, tomato and prawn risotto (with a tip for nailing this notoriously tricky dish) and an extra-crispy crowd-pleasing chicken dish.

Since Adam Liaw sauntered onto our screens in the second season of Masterchef, he’s been a mainstay on our TVs and on our bookshelves. Across multiple cookbooks, Liaw has shared foolproof recipes for feeding our friends, our families and ourselves, laid out with easy-to-understand instructions.

When Liaw creates a time-saving recipe, he doesn’t just factor in cooking and prep time: he thinks about how many ingredients you might need, how much chopping is required and how much washing up it will take. You’ll see this holistic approach in our below collection of six top Adam Liaw recipes for midweek meals. It’s a non-stop parade of hits: 10-minute “carbonara” fried rice, clever tofu doughnuts and scotch fillet tacos that’ll be on the table in less than an hour and more. Need more Liaw? We’ve asked him for his top kitchen hacks and the five things you need for a really great dish.

10-minute “carbonara” fried rice

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Liaw is the first to admit this take on fried rice is “unconventional”. “Truth be told there’s very little ‘carbonara’ about this simple fried rice. I’ve mainly called it that to annoy the carbonarinieri (Italian food police).” Whatever you call it, it’s big on taste – and absurdly quick to pull together.

Extra-crispy tomato-sauce chicken

This tomato-sauce chicken is a riff on a pork-based dish Liaw’s grandmother made for him when he was growing up. Now his version, made with chicken, is a firm favourite of his kids. Make sure you double-fry your strips to guarantee the extra-crispy finish that makes this dish a real winner.

40-minute scotch fillet tacos

One scotch fillet steak goes a long way in this recipe, which serves four people. It’s jazzed up with a zesty guac and a bright pico de gallo, and on the table in around 40 minutes – a weeknight boon, if you ask us.

Tomato and prawn risotto with chilli butter

As anyone who’s eaten a gluggy risotto can attest, getting the consistency of this rice dish down pat is a fine art. Here, Liaw shares a few tips for getting it right. Flavour is loaded into this dish at every step, from the wine and stock the rice is cooked in to the prawns swirled through the risotto and the chilli butter spooned on top.

Ssamjang chicken wrapped in lettuce leaves with nori

Big flavour doesn’t mean big effort – the proof is in this punchy dish. Ssamjang, a Korean dipping sauce, is poured over butterflied roast chicken. Once served, you’ll wrap chunks of chook, along with some steamed rice and nori in lettuce leaves and enjoy.

Speedy tofu doughnuts

If you have 15 minutes, a spatula and a saucepan, you can pull together these light and airy tofu doughnuts, which starred in Liaw’s show The Cook Up. According to the cook they are “so incredibly quick and easy I don’t know if I’ll ever make doughnuts another way again”.

Need more cooking inspiration? Check out our recipe hub.

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