Sandy Tang is a chef and recipe developer who made the final of BBC MasterChef 2020. She was born in the former Portug uese colony of Macau and moved to the UK when she was 13. She’s the co-founder of dumpling specialists, Journey to the West.
I first started cooking properly when I was 15, when I was thousands of miles away from home and really missed its food. This carried forwards into university through hosting dinner parties and feeding friends, but it wasn’t until I competed in MasterChef that I realised I wanted a food business. My business partner, David Solomon, and I shared the goal of creating better quality and more accessible dumplings in the UK.
Growing up, I ate a variety of foods, but mostly Asian-tinged with Portuguese. My mum would make beef stuffed with enoki mushrooms in teriyaki sauce; classic steamed fish with spring onion and ginger; boiled bacalhau (salt cod) with potatoes and vegetables drizzled with olive oil – very Portuguese; maybe serradura as a pudding, a layered dessert with cream and crumbled Marie biscuits (similar to rich tea) – another very Portuguese dish.
We ate together every night for dinner. But the highlight was always Sunday brunch in a teahouse, sometimes with extended family – lots of gossip, all kinds of dim sum (siu mai, har gau, char siu bao, custard tarts). That’s part of the motivation behind Journey to the West.