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It's hard to overstate the centrality of the wok to many Asian recipes. Watching chefs turn out stir-fried dishes in a busy Hong Kong restaurant, agog at the huge whooshes of flame from roaring burners, makes you long for even a bit of that skill. This is self-evident: Parboiling crowded food in a lukewarm nonstick pan doesn't cut it.
Grace Young opens with a recollection of her parents teaching her to respect "wok hay, the prized, elusive, seared taste that comes only from stir-frying in a wok. This book documents her journey and learnings and brings home techniques, stories, lore, recipes, and chef-at-wok photos. She began with a search for "a virtuous wok," or saang teet, made of cast iron. Unlike American cast-iron skillets, these are light and thin.
The Breath of a Wok is one of those rare, eye-opening cookbooks that take the reader into a thrilling world of tradition and mastery. We loved this book for its focus on one of life's simplest pleasures: the little dough package. Asian cuisines are particularly dumpling-centric, and Nguyen who has two books in this list runs the gamut with almost 90 recipes from India to China—boiling, steaming, baking, and frying along the way. Line drawings help with "master shapes" like the Pleated Crescent, Half Moon, and Football origami meets pastry. Complex recipes, like doughy pork-stuffed buns, samosas, and potstickers, are broken into easy-to-follow steps.
And because dumplings are often dunking foods, there's a nice little chapter at the end on dipping sauces, chili oil, and chutneys, plus recipes for the stocks in which to boil the dumplings. Not every dumpling is photographed, but many are, beautifully. A wonderful image, but also a reassuring thought for the neophyte: If a child can do this, you can, too. And so can your kids.
Many dumplings fit into healthy cooking: They're small, balanced, and tend to satisfy. In a word, yum.
You will feel her warm presence in every anecdote, and in every recipe. That approach is welcome in a book of more than recipes designed to introduce a cuisine likely unfamiliar to many cooks. The journey starts with ingredients, of course, and in Vietnam the ingredient list starts with pungent fish sauce.
Nguyen reminds us that many important ingredients are, initially, strange when not from our culture: "If fish sauce seems alien to you, take a whiff of dried porcini mushrooms and then sniff the condiment. The aromas are remarkably similar, and, like good aged cheese, fish sauce smells stronger than it actually tastes. Caramel Sauce—bitter, very dark, and very different from Western caramel—involves the sugar going from "Champagne yellow to light tea to dark tea," then brownish red like "a big, bold red wine" until finally reaching "the color of black coffee or molasses.
Many recipes are healthy, packed with fresh herbs and vegetables, but be mindful of all that sodium-heavy fish sauce. This is a veteran Indian cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey's bid to take a user-friendly approach for cooks who love the flavors of Indian cooking but don't have the time or patience for full mortar-and-pestle deployment. Jaffrey confesses to being time-pressed herself and sets out to deliver characteristic flavors in less time. This might strike a traditionalist as heretical.
For example, traditional curry requires separate browning of wet seasonings onion, ginger, garlic , toasting of dry spices, and browning of meats. In some cases Jaffrey simply puts all of the ingredients together, allows the meat to marinate, and then cooks.
China, Korea. An appreciation for the amazing versatility of the wok is one of several take-aways available to cooks and readers between the covers of The Breath of a Wok , which is so much more than a Chinese cookbook. General Computing. General Film. In a wok, just one wok, you can do it all: stir-fry, pan-fry, deep-fry, steam, poach, boil, braise, smoke.
Baked Beef Curry proved both quick and deeply flavorful. There's nothing careless about this approach. However, she says, "It [chaat masala] adds spicy sourness but is not essential.
Just sprinkle a dash of cayenne, and some roasted cumin seeds, if available, over the top and add some squirts of lime juice. The book's greatest virtue is Jaffrey's familiarity with the entire subcontinent, from Pakistan to Sri Lanka.
Jaffrey makes no health claims, but Indian food is vegetable-centric, grain-oriented, and varied, with meat used sparingly. Duguid is part anthropologist, part brilliant cook, and her recipes simply work in American kitchens. Many dishes in Burma will seem entirely fresh to palates already familiar with Thai or Vietnamese food.
Plus, each of these recipes achieves such richness with 10 ingredients or fewer. Duguid has mastered the arc of flavor development. She writes with deep, local, friendly authority, warning not to taste the eggplant dish halfway through, lest the dried anchovies drive you away. As promised, the flavor was lovely in the end, the anchovies lending a predominantly savory, not fishy, quality. The Best Asian Cookbooks. March 01, Pin ellipsis More. Photo: Randy Mayor. Find our top 8 picks for the best Asian cookbooks of the past 25 years.
Each product we feature has been independently selected and reviewed by our editorial team. If you make a purchase using the links included, we may earn commission. Kristen — Thank you so much! I sent Brilynn some of my thoughts on food photography a few days ago; if you like, I can forward that email to you, too.
Hehe, well, the fat kind of gets absorbed into all of the veggies and potatoes I add a LOT of veggies- guilty complex, maybe? But it goes away…. Heh heh heh. Absolutely delicious! And I still have enough string beans for another round. Name required. Mail will not be published required.
Editorial Reviews. From Publishers Weekly. Among Chinese cookbooks, this one is unusual. The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen: Classic Family Recipes for Celebration and collection of lore and recipes promises to set off a rebirth of Chinese cooking in . This will be one of the books I'll be using for the rest of my life. The Breath of a Wok: Unlocking the Spirit of Wok Cooking Through Recipes and Lore The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen by Grace Young Hardcover $
Think about alternative ways of adding porkishness to the beans. Think about making this dish again. Realize that bacon grease is actually key. Munch away, watching your estimated leftover portions diminish. Remove from heat and stir in the vinegar, sesame oil, and scallions. Brilynn says:. January 25, at am.
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