When they are away from the practice, some of our talented ADAWA members are cooking up a storm in the kitchen. We talk to some dentists with a passion for cooking.
Deepali Behar is a passionate home cook when she isn’t chairside at her and husband Jordan’s Lakelands practice, and if there is any doubt about Deepali’s culinary talents, she has the MasterChef apron to prove it!
Deepali was a contestant on MasterChef Australia in Season 6. “I wasn’t going to apply,” Deepali recalls. “Jordan and I came out here on a working holiday visa from the UK and I really missed my Mum’s cuisine. We were obsessed with the show and Jordan said: ‘You’re a really good cook; why don’t you apply?’.
To her surprise, Deepali’s application was accepted, and she got through a first-round ‘Mystery Box’ challenge. “I was invited back the next day and told I could cook anything I wished but it had to represent me,” she says. “I cooked a vegetarian potato curry, traditional rotlis (flat bread) using a velan rolling pin that my grandfather had made, (he was a carpenter in Tanzania), dhokla and rice. The producers admired the techniques I used and said it was the best curry they had ever had. I was then invited to Melbourne, cooked in front of the judges and I was the second person to receive a coveted MasterChef apron.”
Deepali was away for recording for three months, and says the support from work, Jordan and their patients was invaluable. “I was working for Dr Michael Sturgeon at the time, and I was fortunate to have full backing from work,” she says. “They had a locum cover for me, which I was so grateful for, because there is no way I could have done it otherwise.
“They (the producers) loved my background; my mum is a fantastic cook, having grown up in Uganda and being of Gujarti origin the fusion of Indian and East African food is amazing. I was born in Wigan in the UK and being a dentist stood out a little too. I’m proud of my ancestry, upbringing and profession.
"Also, communication and working as a team was so important on the show, which is also important in dentistry, so coming from a background with those skills really helped.”
After leaving the show, Deepali started her own hustle, ‘Sugar and Spice: Deepali’s Delights’, selling a range of condiments including jams, chutneys, pickles, and spice mixes. It has been on hold since Deepali and Jordan had children, but she still has her food safety registration if she decides to start it up again.
Nowadays, cooking is for enjoyment and family. “I make random and weird cakes for my children,” she says. “The look on their faces when I’ve created a Boeing-A380, cactus or Bingo cake is priceless.
“As a family, we always sit at the dining table and eat dinner together at the end of the day to chat,” she adds. “It doesn’t have to be fancy; it just needs to taste good.”
Talking about food has also proved a good way to make Deepali’s patients comfortable. “I am proud of the fact I was on the show and every single day a patient will ask how to make something, or share a great food venue that they know I’d enjoy,” she says. “We have a beautiful patient who lived in Thailand, and she hand-wrote some recipes and gave them to Jordan to pass onto me.
“It is nice because it humanises you,” she adds. “If you can break the ice with something relatable it can really help a patient, and most people love food.”
Prosthodontist Dr Janice Kan says her and husband Sharin love food – from street food to fine dining. “We cook all types of cuisine from all around the world – Chinese, French, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Middle Eastern, South American, Japanese and South-East Asian,” she says. “We host dinner parties and often end up as organisers for many lunches and dinners for family and friend gatherings.”
Janice says she was born in the food paradise of Hong Kong, where she was mostly exposed to Cantonese cuisine. “Our family used to dine out throughout the weekend and my grandmother will involve us in the preparation of festive foods during Chinese New Year,” she says. “It is very much about bring the family together and celebrate around a dinner table.”
Although Janice grew up with a passion for food, it wasn’t until after she graduated from dentistry that she started cooking. When asked about her signature dish, she says her personal favourites are Mud crab with spring onion and ginger noodles, Tiger prawns vermicelli with XO sauce and Patagonian toothfish
with lobster bisque.
“I think every dentist has a creative side to them and for me – my other avenues to express creativity are through interior design and food,” she says.
She adds her and Sharin love going to cooking classes together (she highly recommends Salt & Co in Perth) and planning culinary trips, both locally and aboard.
“Food for us is not just sustenance, but a fun and exciting process of creation, experimentation and bringing smiles and smirks to faces when they taste a mouthful of food and wish the moment will never end,” she says.
On the weekend, Janice says she loves getting fresh produce from the farmer’s market and creating something to enjoy with her family. “It’s often done over a glass of wine or cocktails, which I have recently learned from a cocktail gastronomy masterclass,” she says. “This is my retirement plan – staying in different cities around the world and experience it at a much slower pace than usual holidays.”
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