Diner’s Diary | Shopping with top chef at a Hong Kong wet market, we spot Chow Yun-fat having breakfast
- Chinese executive chef of the Kowloon Shangri-La hotel, Daniel Cheung, visits Tai Po market to chat to stallholders and get inspiration
- He takes us to his favourite stalls and then back to his kitchen, where he cooks his purchases
“The best way to buy sweet potatoes is to feel them. You want them to feel heavy because if they are light, they don’t have as much starch,” says chef Daniel Cheung Long-yin.
We are shopping for lunch with the Chinese executive chef of the Kowloon Shangri-La hotel at Tai Po market in Hong Kong. He has stopped at a vegetable stall which, he says, sells the best sweet potatoes. He picks up some that are 20cm to 25cm long, and yellow.
He will clean them thoroughly and steam them for about 30 minutes, then peel off the skin, and they are ready to eat.
We try them later, and compared to other sweet potato varieties with orange and purple skins, the yellow ones have a more complex sweetness, thanks to their being grown in fertile soil mixed with volcanic ash in Indonesia.
Cheung visits the market in the New Territories two or three times every month to get inspiration and to learn about ingredients he hasn’t seen before. He gets tips from stall owners on how to cook them. It’s a habit he picked up from his predecessor Mok Kit-keung, who grew up in Tai Po.