Melbourne chefs on the top dishes and kitchen tricks of their mums

• Just like Mum used to make: Our favourite dishes (and the duds we'd rather forget)
• Dinner's ready: Four wholesome recipes perfect for family celebrations

No matter how high up the food chain they are, most chefs spent their early years eating simple dishes, some of them cooked by mum, grandma or an aunt.

A simple pasta bake, a thrifty dinner that reinvents leftovers or a fresh baked cake on the kitchen bench when you get home from school: it's these aromas and tastes that can take you straight back to childhood, no matter how many spoonfuls of caviar you might have eaten.

A handful of Melbourne chefs reflect on the home-cooked dishes they still remember, and the kitchen lessons that the mum in their life imparted to them.

Helly Raichura, Enter Via Laundry

My mum is living with us right now. We were separated for four years due to the pandemic and just life, really. It's great to have her back cooking all these beautiful nutritious things for me and my kids, which as a chef I'm not able to do.

Once a week she will make a brilliant dish. She doesn't like wasting anything at all, so she takes any leftover khichdi (a rice and lentil porridge), adds a bit of besan (chickpea flour) and makes it into dumplings. You cook them in a spiced yoghurt sauce, and serve it like a broth, with fresh chilli, coriander and lemon. We feel very blessed she's here doing these things.

She loves to make sure the kitchen is clean, and I think I have carried that forward. She also taught me less is more. The restraint in her cooking is something I use in the restaurant.

On Saengyojanr, Ging Thai

I grew up in the north-east of Thailand. Food was a big part of my life for as long as I can remember. My mum and I loved cooking nam ya pla together. It's a curry sauce made with fish paste, served with vegetables such as cabbage and snake beans, with vermicelli rice noodles on the side. Mum cooked it for us as young kids and then she and I started making it together. We have a fish curry on our menu at Ging Thai just like it.

Mum taught me the importance of balancing flavours, which is integral to Lao and Thai cuisine. Salty, savoury and sweet flavours all need to shine and not overpower one another.

Francesco Rota, Trattoria Emilia

My mum cooks in a restaurant, so she's pretty good at cooking. One thing she used to make – and still does – is tiramisu. She would make it on Saturday night so it would set before Sunday lunch. But my brother and I would eat half of it when we came home on a Saturday night and she would be so annoyed, so she started hiding it in the freezer.

She used different biscuits to savoiardi; they were much harder. So the biscuits would still be a bit frozen when she took it out for lunch. It was a crunchy tiramisu, but we loved it. And that was the inspiration for our tiramisu at Trattoria Emilia (pictured), which has a layer of chocolate-hazelnut feuilletine (wafer-style biscuit).

Two skills my mum taught me were brodo (broth) making and tortellini making. I come from Modena: the tortellini land. There, they're only as big as a $2 coin. We used to make a lot of tortellini together. And we'd make brodo di cappone, using capon chicken, which has more fat and makes a beautiful brodo. Tortellini en brodo was another thing we'd eat on a Sunday.

Dave Stewart, Ascot Food and Wine

When we were young, we would spend half our time at my grandparents' house who lived on a nice farm in south Gippsland. My mum was a single mum, studying, whereas my grandma was at home more. She was a real green thumb and had an orchard, and grew all the fruit and veg you can dream of. Seeing that as a kid, something I naturally fell in love with was food. It got me in touch with the cycles of seasonality, I suppose.

She was a real country style cook; she didn't cook with a recipe. The way she made it seem so natural was probably my biggest influence. She'd do strudels with clotted cream, or apricot chicken. But she used the fruit from her own orchards. She used to do really nice apple and blueberry strudels. She'd make them in the afternoon and you'd come in [after school] and see them and start picking at the sweetcrust.

Joseph Vargetto, Mister Bianco

Cavatelli pasta was one of these things we'd eat on a Sunday. My mum (pictured with me aged eight) would always make it by hand. Back then, Australia didn't have a good relationship with flour. It was always white processed [flour], you couldn't get proper semolina. But she kind of made do. You couldn't even get the right tools then. She'd use the back of a roof tile to make the ridges in the cavatelli.

For the sauce, she'd chop the onion in her hand, confit it, then add fresh tomatoes from the backyard if it was summer and basil that we'd grow as well. She would always do things in season.

When I did my apprenticeship, I came home and showed her how I'd been taught to chop an onion on a board. She said, "What's the point? Why do you make more things dirty?"

She instilled in me that you have to be resilient but also compassionate. She always said, "Guiseppe, if it's not done properly, don't do it. Make sure everything that has your signature on it, you're proud of."

*Interviews were edited for clarity and length