Masterful Chef Quiz

After years of making meals for the family and doing a pretty good job of it, you’ve decided it’s time to show off your cooking prowess on the world stage and take part in Masterful Chef Asia.

You make it through the initial application stage and find yourself standing alongside 25 others anxiously waiting for the first challenge to be announced.

Question 1 / 10

Round 1 of Masterful Chef Asia: The Family Favourite. You've been tasked with cooking your family's favourite meal and settle on the classic butter chicken – the kids love it. While presenting your meal to the judges, one of them asks you, "what is butter chicken called in India?" Just a casual question, but it would be good to impress them with your knowledge. What will you answer:

• Butter chicken was invented in the UK and doesn’t have an Indian name.
• Butter chicken was invented in Delhi where it is called murgh makhani.
• Butter chicken is a Nepalese dish and is known as chicken tarkari.
• Butter chicken is a dish from Goa where it is called Aloo Gobi.

Round 2: The Spice Test. In front of you is a table of spices in their unprocessed form, which you confidently list off until you come to a curly one. What spice is this….

• Cardamom
• Sumac
• Vanilla
• Cinnamon

Round 3: The Replication Challenge. You’ve been challenged to recreate a dessert after watching it being made by an expert chef. The final product is a soft, fluffy sponge cake, that is bright green. However, you were distracted at points during the chef’s demonstration and as you run to the pantry to pick up ingredients something alludes you – what made that cake green?

Which of the following ingredients could be used to turn your cake green?

• Tumeric
• Goji berry powder
• Sesame powder
• Matcha powder

Round 4: The Japan challenge. Three grueling rounds have culled competitors to 18, including you. The next challenge is to create a Japanese dish of your own liking. Japanese cuisine is not a strong point of yours so you’re a little worried. You decide on a noodle soup, but there is only buckwheat flower in the box of ingredients you’ve been provided. What noodles can you make (pictured):

• Ramen
• Soba
• Shirataki
• Udon

Round 5: The Malaysia Challenge. That Japanese Soba noodle soup was a close one – not one of your finest moments in the kitchen; in fact, you were only saved by a fellow competitor's burned-to-a-crisp yakitori. For Round 5, you’ve been challenged to cook a traditional dish from Malaysia. You travelled through Malaysia on a bicycle in the early 2000s and try and remember some of your dining experiences at restaurants and roadside stalls. The meal that springs to mind is the iconic nasi lamak. You cook the rice, mix up a spicy and flavoursome sambal and start on accompaniments; but, that’s when your two-decade-old memory of Malaysia starts to fail you. Which of the following would you not put on the plate to keep it traditional:

• Egg
• Anchovies
• Fish balls
• Peanuts

Challenge 6: The Aroma Challenge. Your next challenge is to make the most aromatic dish you can. The dish will also be judged on flavour, but its smell will be the key judging criteria. You mull over cooking a beautifully aromatic curry, but after some consideration settle upon a herbaceous Vietnamese pho.

Which of the following aromatic ingredients should you not put into your pho:

• Thai Basil
• Parsley
• Lime juice
• Ginger

Round 7: The China Challenge. The Masterful Chef team have flown you to the home mapo tofu (doufu) to cook this mouth-numbing dish in the place of it's origin. Which province of China have they flown you to?

• Fujian
• Sichuan
  
• Hunan
• Shangxi

Round 8: The Mystery Box Challenge. After really messing up by adding black pepper corns instead of Sichuan pepper corns to your mapo doufu, you find yourself in an elimination challenge: a msytery box.... Lifting the lid off the box, you take no time in scanning the items it contains: The staples (flour, salt, pepper, oil, rice eggs) as well as chicken stock, lime leaves, lemongrass, galangal, chilies, fish sauce, coriander, and three meats: duck, pork and shrimps. Which of the following dishes could you create (three of them require ingredients not listed).

• Tom yum soup
• Nasi goreng
• Peking duck
• Laksa

Round 9: Thanks to a remarkable sequence of mishaps among your fellow contestants, coupled with fortuitous strokes of luck in your favor, somehow you've made it to the penultimate challenge. It's just you and two other competitors left - Meat Pete and BBQ Bill. You really need to shine with this dish and decide to counter Pete and Bill's meaty dishes with a vegetarian one. Which of the following dishes should you cook (it's vegetarian).

• Gado gado (Indonesia)
• Tonkotsu ramen (Korea)
• Tom kha gai (Thailand)
• Phat kaphrao (Thailand)

The Grand Final: The Adventure Test. The judges described your gado gado as limp, inauthentic and watery, but Meat Pete served up raw chicken tandoori that could have killed the judges, so you're through to the grand final. For this test they have coupled cooking with adventure and challenge you to travel as far and wide as you like (within the confines of the continent of Asia) to gather the ingredients of your adventurous meal yourself and cook it on site. BBQ Bill knows exactly where he is going and heads off to catch a flight to Mongolia to catch himself a marmot and cook boodog. You're a little less certain of what to do but settle on bird's nest soup. If you make it to the right location, you'll win the contest as word is Bill has accidently boarded a flight to Moldova. The question: where do buy a plane ticket to?

• Tibet
• Borneo
• Kashmir, India
• North Korea

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