Top Chef Canada’s Dez Lo to team up with friends and fellow Top Chef Canada alumni Haan Palcu-Chang and Billy Nguyen.

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When asked what we can gain by watching an interactive cooking demonstration, Top Chef Canada’s Dez Lo turns to an automotive analogy.

“You can tell me how amazing it is to drive a Ferrari, but unless I get to try it myself, I won’t really know how it feels to go from zero to 60, not unless I get to step on the gas,” says the show’s season 10 runner-up.

Lo knows that some recipes can be tricky to follow, but seeing a chef work through a dish can make the process easier — and a lot more fun. That’s what Lo hopes to bring to the home show Cooking Stage stage, where she’ll team up with friends and fellow Top Chef Canada alumni Haan Palcu-Chang and Billy Nguyen.

New to the Cooking Stage lineup this year is a two-day chef’s table feature, with cooking demonstrations that will centre around B.C. seafood and local ingredients. With seafood supplied by Vancouver-based sustainable seafood provider eatfish.ca, the chefs will demonstrate how to turn fresh ingredients into dishes that can be recreated at home. Lo will appear with Palcu-Chang on Oct. 16 at 4:30 p.m., and with Nguyen on Oct. 17 at 3 p.m.

Palcu-Chang lives on Salt Spring Island, where Lo says people love to entertain with outdoor, farm-to-table dining, an approach that will influence their Cooking Stage collaboration, with dishes focused on fresh, locally sourced ingredients.

Nguyen and Lo have also become close friends, working together on pop-ups in Vancouver and Calgary. With a shared Cantonese background, they enjoy creating Asian-fusion dishes that draw on their heritage, while incorporating local ingredients. They’ll also take that approach at the home show; they’ll create a more intimate, formal dinner, but the dishes will still be approachable. “We want to focus on turning something that you already have in your kitchen into something new, and give it a new spin — teach how to make it into something you may not have known to do, a totally different flavour profile than you’ve done before,” Lo says.

While seafood will be the main focus of the Chef’s Table feature, Lo says home cooks shouldn’t be intimidated by ingredients such as geoduck or sea cucumber. Her friend Jenice Yu, the so-called Sea-E-O of eatfish.ca, introduced her to B.C.’s abundant seafood after she moved to Vancouver from New York. Now, Lo keeps preparations simple, quickly sautéing geoduck or serving it sashimi style with a little light soy sauce. “Genuinely good ingredients should shine on their own,” she says.

That simplicity is part of what Lo hopes visitors will take away from watching the chefs at work. She also encourages home cooks to experiment, rather than follow a recipe too closely. She might swap halibut cheeks into a beef rendang, for instance, or use Sichuan peppercorns in place of jalapeño. “Trust your instincts and play around with it,” she says.

When asked about an ideal fall dinner that incorporates local seafood, Lo imagines a seafood boil packed with Dungeness crab, Salt Spring mussels, Vancouver Island clams and big pieces of halibut cheek, all mixed in a creamy Cajun butter sauce and dumped over a newspaper-covered table. Add Chilliwack peaches-and-cream corn, crusty bread and a cold glass of B.C. beer, and you have a meal Lo says could be made almost entirely from local ingredients.

“You can cook the entire pot with ingredients found within 100 kilometres of B.C. You don’t even need to go anywhere else.”

The Vancouver Fall Home Show runs from Oct. 15 to 18 at the Vancouver Convention Centre, West. Find the Main Stage and Cooking Stage schedule, a rundown of features and workshops, plus show hours and tickets at vancouverfallhomeshow.com.