Labyrinth’s chef Han Liguang cooks a chilli crab-inspired dish in 15 minutes on Korean cooking competition show, Chef & My Fridge

Cook a chilli-crab inspired dish with Korean ingredients in 15 minutes? No problem. Chef Han Liguang of one-Michelin-starred restaurant Labyrinth showcased his culinary chops on a recent episode of popular Korean cooking variety show, Chef & My Fridge. The episode aired in South Korea on Sunday (11 May). The episode will be streamed on Netflix here in June. Han is also the first Singaporean chef to appear on the long-running cooking competition show, which made a comeback last year. 

Chef & My Fridge sees top South Korean chefs compete against one another using ingredients from a celebrity guest’s refrigerator. Each chef has to whip up a dish using the available ingredients within 15 minutes. The series’ regular chefs include many alumni of the hit Netflix cooking competition show, Culinary Class Wars, including season one winner, Kwon Sung-jun, who is better known as Napoli Matfia, and American-Korean chef Edward Lee. 

Participating celebrities, whose refrigerators have been hauled from their homes, have included actor Song Joong-ki and J-Hope of K-pop boy band BTS. Chef & My Fridge saw a revival in its popularity last year following the hit series, Culinary Class Wars. The former was first aired from 2014 to 2019. 

Han made a guest appearance on the show’s Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants special episode. Labyrinth is ranked No. 37 on this year’s list. Pitting against the show’s resident Korean chefs were Han, Yusuke Takada of contemporary French restaurant La Cime in Osaka (No. 6) and Chef Antimo Maria Merone of contemporary Italian restaurant in Hong Kong (No. 32). 

On why he decided to be a guest chef on Chef & My Fridge, Han says: “The show has a global reach and I want to showcase Singapore cuisine to the world.”

It also helped that Han is friends with Choi Hyun Seok, who was one the “white chefs” on Culinary Class Wars and the head chef at Choi Dot, a Korean-European restaurant in Seoul. They first met nine years ago in Singapore for a filming project, and have stayed friends since. 

Interestingly, Han had to battle Choi in the Chef & My Fridge episode. Han believes that it was a worthy match-up. “Our style of innovative cuisine is pretty similar and he has accumulated the most number of pins from winning cook-offs on Chef & My Fridge.”

Han flew into Seoul specially for the filming of this episode, which was completed within a day in late April. In the lead-up to filming, the guest chefs were given two days to think about their competition dish. The cook-offs were judged by the celebrities, who would only reveal some of their dining preferences during the show. The celebrity judge of Han’s cook-off, whose refrigerator was also featured, was K-pop idol Kim Jae-Joong, who used to be a member of boyband, TVXQ.

Han says: “He likes the squid to be slightly chewier and with its skin on. He also likes his food to be very spicy. He likes strong flavours, but doesn’t like oiliness and dishes to be too rich.” And the dish also had to pair well with Kim’s newly launched makgeolli. 

For his three-part dish, Han whipped up a chilli crab and squid dish, inspired by one of Singapore’s most popular dishes, chilli crab, all within 15 minutes. He steamed the squid and crab, before stir-frying them in a sauce concocted with ssamjung, oyster sauce, ketchup, soju and Korean fish sauce. For a spicy kick, he added Buldak hot sauce to the dish. He also made makegeolli-spiked Korean rice cakes as an alternative to mantou, and a palate cleanser of kimchi and sliced pears. 

“The 15-minute time limit was real, there was no preparation work that I could do,” he shares. “Up till the last minute before I started cooking, I was thinking which way would be more time-efficient and yield a better texture - do I slice the squid before steaming it, or vice versa?” 

Cooking on the Chef & My Fridge was a nerve-wrecking ride for Han, who is used to the high-octane world of cooking in fine-dining restaurants. He looks back: “My hands were literally shaking when I was plating the dish. I didn’t want to embarrass myself, my restaurant and Singapore on this show. I wanted to make Singapore proud. We are familiar with Korean food and culture, but I do want Koreans to know about our cuisine as well.” 

However (and spoiler alert here), Han lost to Choi in the cook-off, who incorporated makegeolli into the sauce of his dish.

Han was also in awe of the scale and pace of filming of the cooking variety show. He says: “There were at least 50 cameras around the entire set, and there was a team of 10 producers and they spoke to us via the earpiece. There was also a live translation in English to what was going on during the show as well. Another challenge was getting past the language barrier as the show was filmed in Korean and set-up instructions were also in Korean.” 

Any tips for chefs who aspire to compete on Chef & My Fridge? Han says: “Keep the dish simple and delicious but stay true to yourself and the cuisine that you want to represent. Be very organised and have minimal movement in the cooking station. Run through the movement in your head before cooking.”

Diners here can be the judge on which dish fared better. Chefs Han and Choi will hold a four-hands collaboration at Labyrinth on 13 and 14 July, where they plan to present their competition dishes on Chef & My Fridge, as part of the menu. 

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Chef & My Fridge is streaming on Netflix.