The Yum List chats with Azura Othman, Product Specialist of MEC3 and discovers some of her favourite places and some crazy stories from behind the scenes.
What do you do and how did you get into the industry?
I am a product chef representing an Italian company producing ingredients for pastry and gelato.
First I qualified as a pastry chef and then worked for hotels before moving over to this segment of the industry.
Share with us an interesting story from behind the scenes.
I have been travelling for the past 10 years as my schedule revolves around touring Asia to promote the brand and assist clients with the technical aspect of pastry, flavour pairings and frozen sweet in a detailed manner.
What’s the best/ worst part of your job?
Best: doing what I love, meeting people who have the same passion as I do, travelling and trying all sorts of cuisine.
Worst: not really worst as I would say… more like I hate… delayed flights.
What’s your favourite flavour at MEC3?
I truly love MEC3’s cookies flavour that is a great shortbread flavour that works with every component of pastry that I have made hot or cold, even in a frappe. Salted butter caramel and extra dark fondant are also favourites.
What’s one of the craziest things you’ve seen behind the scenes?
As I tour a lot within the region with the team I am the usual face in trade shows that we participate in from one end of Asia to the other. Most of the time we have small issues of things that we cannot control such as water leakage underneath the platform. One night, however, the power went off at midnight when we had all of our tiny pretty little FROZEN cakes in it. It’s crazy but we always made it as a team. There is also the time when we built and demolished the kitchen within five days, these are among the craziest, wildest and sweetest chapters of my life!
The perfect day off would be…
Hanging out with my close friends eating cakes.
A day in the life of a product chef is…
…loads of recipe development, paperwork and research and development.
What do you do for fun?
The usual a northern Malay girl would do: I love to cook and have friends and relatives over and I love going out to eat too.
What’s something you’d like readers to know about MEC3?
1)That it is based in Rimini, Italy and our factory is huge and beautiful! But most of the staff know each other by name it from marketing to manufacturing. It’s like a global meet up in the staff cafeteria.
2)That I love my job and that speaks for the culture of the company that it is filled with people like me.
What’s your favourite food and beverage pairing?
I love water so I guess I don’t qualify to speak.
But I can say that also being a coffeeholic I think that every dessert goes with coffee.
What’s your view of the food scene in KL?
It is not like what it used to be, this is the era of savvy culinary consumerism.
I see many cafes that serve really good quality food and beverages which means more places for me to go and try with my brother and our friends. I’ve found much more attention to quality lately.
What’s in store for you in the upcoming months?
Travels, more travel and a visit to a coffee plantation!
I sure would love to try this MEC3 cookies and stuff.
I do enjoy these interviews so many interesting people. Cheers Diane
True.. Doing what you love is the best ever 🙂