Adam Liaw on Canberra, freakshakes and the migrant food experience

• Three great Adam Liaw recipes

Adam Liaw is musing on the freakshake, the delicious-looking but over the top social media phenom that's unexpectedly put Canberra on the food map across the nation. "I'm not a fan of the freakshake I guess," he says. "It's to me more in that American style of 'How many calories can we pump into a meal - and that's what makes it good.' My philosophy on food is very different to that. But it's just a bit of fun, no one is suggesting that it's part of a balanced diet! If you just look at it as the bit of fun that it's intended as, then it's not a huge problem."

So perhaps he won't be waiting for three hours in Manuka. But Liaw will be coming to Canberra in October to chat with fans at the inaugural Meet the Chef dinner at the Australian National University. He'll be talking about his new cookbook, Adam Liaw's Asian Cookery School. And while he's been a regular visitor to the capital previously (for FreeTV events), this time he's looking forward to eating some of what Canberra's serving up.

"You hear an awful lot about the Canberra food scene these days and there are some fantastic looking restaurants," he says. "I haven't been, to be honest, because when I'm in Canberra I'm usually working so I don't get a lot of free time. But hopefully when I'm there this time I can get out and see a few restaurants."

It's been five years since Liaw took to our TV screens to win the 2010 series of MasterChef Australia. The former corporate lawyer is now a fixture in our celebrity chef circuit - he hosts Destination Flavour on SBS, writes for The Guardian and his recipe columns are a must-read in Fairfax's Good Food and Food & Wine. His onscreen warmth and likeable personality give him an everyman charm. And on the phone he's thoughtful and considered, turning over ideas and offering interested, polite responses.

For instance, I'd really like to hear his thoughts on a recent piece in the Washington Post about the burgeoning popularity of what might be described as "hipsterised modern Asian" - kimchi this, pork buns that, tripe ramen the other. Ruth Tam, the child of immigrant Chinese parents, speaks bluntly about "how it feels when white people shame your food culture - then make it trendy." She talks about how her American friends declared her house smelt of "grossness" because of her parents' cooking, but now the Cantonese dishes of her childhood are popping up on menus in hot new restaurants - food as cultural currency, used to add a gloss of coolness to a chef's repertoire.

Liaw was born in Malaysia but his family moved to Adelaide when he was a young child. He says he can identify closely with Tam. "Food is so closely tied to culture generally," he says. "If you're feeling insecure about being a migrant or something, as I was when I was younger, whether it's kids picking on you because you're Chinese or you're embarrassed because all the other kids have meat pies for lunch and you've got fried rice in a thermos which is what happened to me when I was younger."

But to him the food shaming is a symptom of something bigger - the meeting of migrant and established culture. "I don't think it's all about the food, it's a broader cultural issue which a lot of minority kids have growing up and certainly I had a near identical experience to what she was describing in the Washington Post," he says. "It's part of living in a multicultural society. If you go back to the '70s and '80s and maybe in the '60s you'd get Italian and Greek kids talking about the same experience I had."

Liaw says he's not keen on another current trend - the hedonistic excess represented by huge burgers, mountains of southern buttermilk fried chicken, crazy cakes. "I think when it comes to food, less is better definitely in almost every sense. Fewer ingredients, fewer calories, fewer minutes spent in the kitchen," he says. "Overcomplicating food is a real problem that we have [had] I think, almost the entire history of modern food, ever since convenience food came out. Food was historically something we did every day as a matter of course like brushing your teeth or having a shower. But when convenience foods came out then the narrative had to change, in order for convenience foods to be more desirable, then the message had to change to make normal cooking very difficult."

But if we look at Asian cuisine or traditional Italian or French cuisine, he contends, we see simplicity. "Traditional food is always very, very simple, very few ingredients, very easy and quick, not a huge amount of time spent in the kitchen and I think that's the way we should all be cooking. There's not a lot of room for freakshakes."

That simplicity is what he wants to bring out in Asian Cookery School. Liaw offers step by step instructions for classic Asian dishes - fried rice, noodle soups, sushi. "I wanted to write the book because it's not like you go in[to cooking] and you learn something in a couple of years. Cooking is a build up of knowledge, I guess, of everything." When he was little he would go with his family to a Chinese restaurant, see the fish swimming in their big blue tanks. It didn't occur to the young Adam that the fish were food but it formed part of his subconscious food training. "Your grandma tells you tips here, your mum gives you tips there. I spent a lot of time in Japan and learnt a lot of things from my in-laws there."

So he passes on plenty of tips himself. "That's how I wanted to write this book. It's not just 'Here are the rules for cooking, go follow them,' it's little tips here - 'This is what you should be looking for when you're frying in a wok,'" he says. "I wrote the recipe first and put myself in the position of if I was standing next to somebody who was cooking them what are the points that I would tell them and what are the things that are so often left out of recipes themselves."

Among his favourites are a recipe for a pork belly, cabbage and shiitake mushroom hot pot that he cooks a lot at home - what he calls "simple food that is best when it is simple". And he wants us all to take that lesson away with us. "I always think when I go out and have a stir fry or something from a restaurant - Australian stir fries taste nothing like the stir fries that I grew up eating. They have too many ingredients. To me simplifying it by leaving out most of the ingredients that you put in is the key to making a good stir fry."

Less, as always, is more, and Liaw wants to turn that into a trend of its own.

The Meet the Chef dinner with Adam Liaw is at University House on Thursday, October 8. See unihouse.anu.edu.au