Our expert: Chef Jiraroj Navanukroh

Executive Chef, Unilever Food Solutions, Thailand

“Cooking with passion lets me create sensational dishes.”

This belief is what helped Chef Jiraroj win the silver medal in a cooking competition in Hong Kong.

His interest in cooking started when he was a child, as he often helped his grandmother prepare food. Even his friends loved coming over to taste his dishes and often complimented his cooking. In order to pursue his culinary interests, Chef Jiraroj decided to join a cooking course at Dusit Thani Hotel and worked at a food company later on. After that, he left for Sydney, Australia, to take an advanced cooking course. When he came back to Thailand, he worked in restaurant catering for 2 years and now works for Unilever Food Solutions, Thailand.

Apart from preparing ingredients and meals that exceed cooking standards, Chef Jiraroj gets his inspiration from travelling to different countries, and brings back experiences to adapt and add to his dishes.

After a long training, he has created an impressive dish during a cooking competition in Hong Kong in which Chef Jiraroj was assigned to cook Snapper fish. His creation idea is the rolled fish with bread. The highlight of the dish he created was choosing Thai herbs such as lemongrass and garlic as ingredients. Perhaps, due to the newly unique but harmonious flavor, he won a silver medal from this competition. 

One key factor to being a great chef is kitchen management, including controlling quality of each dish – a task that is quite challenging because it requires the collective experiences of the chefs who each have different techniques when it comes to cooking.

However, the heart of Chef Jiraroj’s cooking is to never stop learning, and keep practicing to develop one’s skill.