Let's Do Lunch: Feast Chef Rob Cunningham's Mango and Mint Salad

Sponsored by TooToo Organic Farm (沱沱工社) – find all of the organic, natural, and healthy ingredients you’ll need for this recipe and more by visiting their English online shopping website: shop.tootoo.cn – it’s easy to make orders and get your products via TooToo’s own Cold-Chain logistics system to your door. Ask your favorite restaurant where they source their food supplies – TooToo Organic Farm can be your reliable resource! 

Rob Cunningham grins while tossing handfuls of citrus in the air and catching each one by one. The Australian born the chef at Feast (a restaurant in the Lido area’s popular EAST Beijing hotel) admits that healthy eating can be a figurative juggling act in Beijing. Food safety scandals, language barriers, tricky access to familiar ingredients, and the pace of life in our bustling metropolis are all enough to overwhelm most expats. But that doesn’t mean that we need Cunningham’s masterful hand eye coordination, or his esteemed kitchen skills, to keep from fumbling and dropping the ball.  

As he catches the last piece of fruit, Cunningham places the citrus on his cutting board for today’s dish, a mango and mint salad rife with passion fruit and yogurt. He begins dice up the ingredients,  before describing how expats and locals can equally enjoy this snack: “A lot of Chinese people don’t like things that are too sweet. So it’s good for Beijingers to know a few snacks that are fruit driven.” 

Cunningham had plenty of access to such citrus snacks as a boy growing up in the small southern Australian town of Milawa. Back then we would pluck such passion fruits from the vines on his parents’ farm. 

“Where I come from it was all pretty small properties and holistic farming,” he says, adding that helped his family avoid the pitfalls of most major, modern large scale agriculture. For them, going organic was by no means a hip trend: “We weren’t certified organic but we didn’t use any herbicides on our crops. Growing up in the country people didn’t spray their vegetables, there were bugs on the vegetables because there were bugs on the vegetables, that’s just the way it was. There was no organic or nonorganic. People just grew things and that was that.”

For today’s dish Cunningham diced up oranges, kiwis and a hulking mango bordering on the size of a cantaloupe. But he adds that anything tropical, especially strawberries and bananas, can make easy substitutes. To further that point he says: “It’s good to make something like this versatile. You don’t have to use yogurt in it if you’re vegan, and you don’t need to include honey if you don’t want to make it too sweet.”

Aside from the mint, we sourced all of the ingredients in this recipe from Tootoo Organic Farm (a reliable organic, natural food online shopping supermarket).

Ingredients:
- 2 mangoes
- 2 passion fruit
- 200 mls of yogurt 
- 50 mls of honey
- 50g fresh mint 

Directions:

1.    Dice the fruit into small pieces.

2.    Mix in yogurt.

3.    Sprinkle the mint on top.

4.    Add honey

5.    Chef Cunningham recommends serving this in a glass to make the dish more visually appealing.

About the Author: A ravenous foodie and frequent tbj contributor, Kyle Mullin has been working as a freelance reporter in Beijing since 2011.

Photos: Ken Liu

This series is sponsored by TooToo Organic Farm. Ask your favorite restaurant where they source their food supplies – TooToo Organic Farm can be their reliable choice!

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For more recipes made with TooToo's fresh organic ingredients, check out Chef Jun Trinh's pork and shiitake meatloaf, flavorful beef larp and spiced fish cake pasta.