asian delicacies

I spent a lot of time thinking about what my Personal Project should be and after much thought, I eventually decided that I want it to be cooking. Whenever I travel around the world, I always look forward to the different varieties of food I could try but due to my religion as a Muslim, I am sometimes limited in options. I have also done cooking and baking back when I was a kid, like making pizza and baking cakes and cookies. I even did some of these back when I was in Year 7 and studying in Singapore. I had made chocolate and ham muffins with ingredients and a recipe provided while having to create my chocolate cupcakes for my summative assessment with my recipe and ingredients. The result was decent, the cupcakes were sweet and chocolatey but were crumbly and had too much vinegar. I decided to choose cooking since I haven’t done it as much as baking and because sometimes in my free time, I watch cooking tutorials and would always want to try and make a dish myself, and the Personal project is an opportunity for me to try and develop cooking skills, not only to fulfill my interest but also to cook for myself in the future when I am independent.

Product Goal

I want my product to be something that would help me learn how to cook in the process, which is why my product goal would be to create a cooking channel where I feature five cooking tutorials about Asian food. The reason I chose a cooking channel is that it feels interesting to record myself cooking and it also helps me to evaluate the techniques I used to create a dish. I also based the dish around Asia because Asia is the largest continent in the world so it has more cultural diversity, allowing me more options for my cooking channel and not only that, but I also plan to talk about the culture and history behind each dish in my videos.

Reflection

My final product is a YouTube channel featuring 5 cooking tutorials and a teaser video as a channel trailer. During the process, I learned how to make certain Asian cuisines such as the Bibimbap and Rendang along with their background during research. But while researching, I understood the global context of Personal and Cultural Expression. I learnt from my research that each cuisine reflects a certain part of history or a historical event and the culture of the country they came from. The pho reflects on the French’s influence on Vietnam, the splitting, and the Fall of Saigon. Meanwhile, Rendang reflects on the Minangkabau society with each ingredient present. I was glad I got to learn about those backgrounds and I hoped that by explaining them in my videos, viewers can learn more about those dishes and how they reflect each significant event in history and the countries they came from.

Initially, I thought that I knew more about myself, but while creating the product, I got a better understanding of my strengths, weaknesses and improvements. I found out that one of my strengths are researching a dish’s background and recipe. Not only that, but I was successful at learning cooking techniques like flipping, which took me two trials to master.

Despite the strengths, I got a better understanding of my weaknesses and the consequences, the biggest one being time management. Even though I have a product plan, I failed to manage my time well because of school and such. I tried making adjustments where I do all the food trials first and master them before making the videos to make things easier because of school work. Although I was following the schedule in the first few weeks, I eventually lagged to the point I finished all the trials by mid-December despite my plan is to finish them in early December while also making the cooking tutorial ten days before the deadline. Because of that, I was stressed and didn’t have much time to put more effort into editing the videos or doing reshoots when things like the taste or demonstration went wrong. And that is where I understood areas to improve on, mostly my time management along with better research.

Product Evaluation

I was very successful in making my product seem more like a YouTube channel by reaching the required subscribers, views and likes. The pad thai and bibimbap were my most successful dishes for getting positive results for the taste and aesthetics from the taste-testing and polls. I could have worked on adding more salt to the rendang and plating the okonomiyaki better by adding fewer toppings and placing the sauces better. But the least successful dish is the pho as it failed the taste test and aesthetic, so I have to try using less cinnamon, more salt and better plating for that one by using fewer basil leaves and adding more colour into the broth. My demonstration could have been more successful if I did not edit out some steps and became more clear in some parts. And finally, I could have added more background information into some of the dishes like the pho, pad thai and okonomiyaki, while making the explanation clear and understandable. Overall, my final product was mostly successful and only had a few minor problems that could be improved.