Our expert: Chef Sid Ananon

Thai Cuisine Chef, Unilever Food Solutions, Thailand

“Caring about your cooking means happy stomachs for customers, and a happy heart for the chef.”

Chef Sid believes that learning from all the experiences he has been through has helped him create amazing dishes and become a better chef.

Born into a family where both parents can cook, Chef Sid’s first ventures into the world of cooking was as his family’s taste tester. After his graduation, he tried working in non-culinary fields but found the jobs dissatisfying. One day, he had a chance to study Thai cuisine in a hotel management school, and it was then that he discovered what his real passion was. He went on to work for a restaurant and hotel, before joining Unilever Food Solutions, Thailand.

All these experiences, especially those that he gained during his cooking career, allowed Chef Sid to find out what suits him best, as well as enabled him to understand and love being a chef. These long-collected experiences also help him in his cooking.

For tips on choosing ingredients, Chef Sid gives priority to freshness and cleanliness. He also places great importance on adapting recipes to invent new and different flavours or menus. For example, putting lotus roots in Thai yellow curry creates new textures that make the dish more unique. He loves self-learning and often creates original recipes using new, different ingredients.

Chef Sid finds inspiration in everything. In fact, he believes that anything can become an inspiration and be cultivated into ideas for better dishes. To him, a good chef is one who can create various dishes, but a better cook is one who also cares for the cooking process and ingredient-choosing, which is really the heart of cooking. Just like frying an egg, the person who knows an amazing frying technique is not the best chef. Instead, it is the person who keeps practicing until they know how to make it good.

In summary, Chef Sid believes that if you go all out to create your dishes, they will always taste good.