Customer Reviews

The Asian Grocery Store Demystified (Take It with You Guides)

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Unfortunately I was not as enraptured with this book as most of the other reviewers. I don't feel it would be terribly useful for a beginning Asian cook.
I also found some inaccurate or less familiar descriptions; for instance many recipes call for "thick soy," which in this book is called "dark soy, or superior soy" but a novice wouldn't know those distinctions.
Additionally the book only gives one or maybe two names for the same thing; if you're cooking something from another culture confusion may reign! For instance in this book belacan (spelled blacan in most other Asian cookbooks I own), which is a common Asian ingredient, is the only word used for dried shrimp paste -- it's also known as trasi (Indonesia), kapi (Thailand) and mam tom (Vietnam). In the grocery store I have bought a wonderful paste that is packaged only under the name "trasi." Using this book, who would know?
Among its weaknesses I find the dearth a pictures a detriment. Many shoppers (like me) are quite visual and look for colors or bottle shapes. It would be more helpful to have photos of some ingredients; for instance showing the difference between bean thread noodles and rice sticks, or what a jackfruit looks like.
I found the index difficult to use. Something might be referenced in the text but not found in the index. Drives me nuts.
However, there are some strengths to this book. It's a convenient size to bring to the store and gives a nice overview. It's also helpful for the novice to have brand recommendations, but I can safesly say, having shopped for ingredients in Minnesota and California (and in Australia), that not all the same brands are imported to everywhere and that what she recommends may not be in your market.
If you really want to get serious about Asian ingredients I suggest you check out three books: "Chinese Cooking, Step by Step techniques" by Yan Kit Martin (Random House). This book has photos and Chinese characters for many different ingredients. You can easily take it to the market. Charmaine Solomon's "The Complete Asian Cookbook" (Lansdowne) has a good glossary of ingredients in the back of the cookbook, but it's a big book to heft around (I think the new edition is paperback though). Lastly, if you can find it, "Charmaine Solomon's Encyclopedia of Asian Food" (William Heinemann Australia) is well worth seeking out. It's the best of the bunch. Loads of ingredients listed alphabetically, pictures, a great index, some good recipes -- this weighty book has it all. Worth lugging to the market if you need help.

Asian food tastes good, that part is not so mysterious. As a lifelong lover of the gifts of the Oriental cornucopia, and as an occasional, bewildered visitor to Oriental markets, I have found a trustworthy guide to calm my fears and open my eyes to the logical patterns extent in Asian groceriesÉ. Sort of like seeing the tree in the structure of its leaf. BladholmÕs handy, compact guide is jam packed with a veritable taxonomy of Asian foodstuffs. After several trips, guidebook in tow, I now know my way around the numerous varieties of noodles, rice, veggies, spices, condiments, and sweets. My taste buds require fire and ice, and the yin yang organization of a typical Asian grocery that Bladholm so clearly and deftly describes, complete with charming, lovingly done, little word sketches drawn from her extensive Asian travels, as well as her uncannily accurate, line drawings helps to make a trip to the Asian grocery store as easy as apple pie and ice cream, just substitute the apples with pomegranates and the pie with soy bean paste confections that boggle the palette as well as the eye. Hers is a great book, it does what it title claims. It is a totally demystifying experience!

The author does a great job of shedding some light on some of the lesser known cuisines of Asia--such as Korea and Cambodia. That is not to say that the more familiar cuisines of China and Japan are not covered. She explains many of the more esoteric ingredients and herbs of those countries as well. A really useful book for both the beginner, interested in expanding their culinary horizons, and the more advanced who don't have the ability to read asian languages--I've cooked Asian foods for many years, and still find myself stumped with trying to figure out what the heck to do with an ingredient. I usually ask someone, but I now have a resource to turn to, to supplement my information. Also, a plus is the size of the book--it will neatly fit into one's back pocket or purse. Well done!

I have been regularly venturing into various Asian markets for many years, and although in doing so I have gained some knowledge of the basics of Asian cooking, there is still a vast amount I didn't know until I bought this book. The Asian Grocery Store Demystified finally answers many of the questions I've had for years, but was hesitant to ask the store owner. The book is based on the author's frequent visits to a Chinese grocery store, therefore other Asian cultures get a light treatment. However, by itself Chinese cooking is vast and varied, and it would probably be impossible for any one book to cover the full range of food items to be found, so I give her credit for covering what she did, including various other Asian foods. There are no photos, and I feel that the more uninitiated cook of Asian cuisine will be at a bit of a loss without them, but the author does a good job of describing much of what you will often find, and the random drawings help. The book includes descriptions of the basic cooking utensils, cooking techniques, a brief glossary, and a smattering of recipes from different Asian cultures. I particularly appreciate the author's encouragement of the reader to try food items that the stranger to Asian cuisines might otherwise wrinkle his or her nose to.

This small paperback not only demystifies the Asian grocery, but also the Asian recipe and menu. I was able to quickly look up items that I couldn't spell but had long been curious about because the book is organized by the sections in the grocery. After quenching my initial curiosities, I had to sit down and read the interesting book cover to cover. Each ingredient is discussed as to appearance, taste, texture, uses, history and quality with references to preferred brands or possible substitutes. There are a few basic recipes included to try right away, but this book best serves as a supplement to other Asian and vegetarian cookbooks and in preparation for shopping or dining. My only disappointment was not finding the recipe for Sweet Thai Tea listed in the index but omitted from the content.

LOS ANGELES TIMES Cookbook Watch by Russ Parsons.

It's happened to all of us: Inspired by a particularly good cookbook or restaurant meal, we head for an ethnic market, vowing that we will learn just what it is that makes this food so wonderful. Then when we get there, we can only stand there, transfixed by a bewildering variety of ingredients we've never seen. If it's Asian cooking you want to explore, you're in luck, though. "The Asian Grocery Store Demystified," by Linda Bladholm (Renaissance Books, $14.95), walks you through the market - both fresh ingredients and prepared- and explains what each item is, and then tells you what to look for or recommends the best brands. Bladholm, a well-traveled frequent contributor to Singapore and Asia Pacific magazines, covers a broad territory-everywhere from Japan and the Philippines to Southeast Asia. It's all packaged in a convenient paperback that will neatly fit in a hip pocket or purse. Just where you want it the next time good intentions strike.

BOOK PROVIDES A COOK'S TOUR OF ASIAN MARKETS

"The mysterious Orient" is just another cliché until you walk into an Asian grocery store for the first time. Red yeast rice, black Thai sticky rice; gyoza wrappers, lumpia wrappers; nam pla, nam prik-the array of unfamiliar products, some labeled in unfamiliar languages, can be downright intimidating. Happily, Linda Bladholm is here to explain it all to us. The Miami Beach writer is the author of The Asian Grocery Store Demystified, a pocketbook-size take-along guide. After giving us an overview of a typical Asian market, she takes up and down the aisles in 20 chapters arranged by food group, from that staff of Asian life, rice, to "Exotic Items for the Cultivated Palate" (fish lips, anyone?). Each chapter contains succinct descriptions of dozens of products, including cooking tips and brand recommendations, sometimes illustrated by Bladholm's pen-and-ink sketches. (Red yeast rice, by the way, is similar to brown rice and is considered poor man's fare in Asia; black Thai sticky rice is chewy and earthy-tasting; gyoza wrappers are crepe-like skins used for deep-fried Filipino banana rolls; nam pla is Thai fish sauce and nam prik is Thai chili paste.) The 234 page soft-cover book concludes with primers on Asian cooking utensils and techniques plus about 30 recipes Bladholm collected during 10 years of living in Singapore, Malaysia and Japan and traveling throughout Asia.

`The Asian Grocery Store Demystified' by book designer and illustrator, Linda Bladholm is an exposition of Oriental ingredients with a very nice little twist which saves it from being a poor man's `Bruce Cost's Asian Ingredients'. While Cost's classic book deals with the serious culinary details of a great many basic ingredients, Ms. Bladholm's book, as suggested by her title, is much more pointedly directed at the shopper's experience in your typical strip mall Oriental market.

The author adds appeal and charm to her book by opening it with a visit to her own local mom and pop run Oriental grocery store. The store in question was just a bit better organized and stocked than my own favorite Filipino run store in southern New Jersey, but all the familiar staples were there, if not in all the familiar places.

The device of providing a guided tour of an Asian market is reinforced by mentioning all the major brand names for staples such as rice, noodles, sauces, oils, and spice mixes, with opinions by the author of which may be the preferred brands. While I found a few misstatements, such as describing a gluten free flour as `general purpose' (general purpose flours by definition have 10% to 12% gluten producing proteins), and I missed some possible warnings against Texmati rice as a less than useful substitute for Basmati rice, I believe the advice and information in this book is a really great supplement to other books on Asian ingredients with a more scholarly bent.

By far the biggest weakness of the book is the difference in quality between the promise of `over 400 illustrations of ingredients' and the quality of those illustrations. The illustrations in the book are all small black and white line drawings easily fitting into an inch square area with lots of the pictures giving no sense of the kind of thing they are depicting. The little picture of ginger certainly looks like the ginger with which I am familiar, but the picture of the related galangal rhizome does little to assure me that I would be able to use that picture to pick it out from bins of produce labeled in Chinese characters. These poor illustrations give the lie to the claim that this is a `Take It With You' guide, in that it is dealing with a guide to items which may all be labeled in not only a foreign language, but in a script we are simply not used to interpreting. The very clever chapter headings of Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Tagalong and Korean ideograms for food categories (with English translations) do nothing to help the situation.

Note that unlike many other books on Asian ingredients, this book has few recipes using these ingredients. This is not necessarily a weakness, as it means that almost all the space in the book is dedicated to the book's principle topic, the groceries. And, much of this space is dedicated to subjects which purely culinary books may not touch such as teas and medicinal herbs and spices. This is probably not the best book on these subjects, but treating these topics enhances the treatment of the book's primary metaphor, the Asian grocery store,, as they do, in fact, appear in Asian grocery stores. My most satisfying discovery was the appearance of classic frozen `fast foods' such as potstickers and Chinese dumplings. After our 25 pound sacks of rice, the primary reason for going to our favorite Asian market was to pick up a supply of frozen pork dumplings.

The book also does a nice job of featuring those things that are uniquely Chinese or Japanese. The short appendix on oriental cooking methods and utensils is not too helpful. These will be of little value if your Asian store has a good selection of cooking utensils. It does not, for example, give any clues about the various styles of woks or the various materials or what makes a good wok. This is especially important, as the criteria for a good wok are almost exactly the opposite of those for a good modern saute pan.

This book is great if you find yourself living within easy shopping distance of a good Oriental market, assuming that market covers all of east Asia and not, for example, just India and Pakistan. The book also useful if you plan to order lots of Asian groceries over the Internet, as the recommended brands gives one some assurance they are not buying sawdust. The book is less valuable for the culinary generalist, who has no special interest in Asian cuisine, especially in that the book includes no bibliography. For those readers, Bruce Cost's book mentioned above is far superior a source.

As an aficionado of Asian food, both at home and in restaurants, and also as a frequent traveler to the Far East, I was very happy to find this much needed book in my local bookshop. In it I found essential information necessary for purchasing and preparing many of my favorite dishes. The descriptions of many of the items gave me the impetus to try and recreate some restaurant favorites, right in my very own home. The drawings made it easy to find many of the sauces, condiments and vegetables that I needed to purchase but previously had been undecipherable to me. Reading the book, I felt as though I truly was walking through my local Asian grocery store! The recipe for Blood and Skin Tonic Soup was a real find, as I had been trying to recreate at home some of the holistic recipes I had found at a local restaurant. This book has given me a lot of new and unique information, as well as confidence, for preparing Asian food at home. The book even fits in my pocketbook! The Asian Grocery Store Demystified truly has demystified Oriental cooking for me, and is a must-have item in the kitchen of any Asian food aficionado!

Before picking up this book, note that it was published in 1999... it doesn't seem THAT long ago, but in terms of your average American's familiarity with Asian ingredients, it's practically eons. While Chinese (or Chinese-American, more accurately) food has been around for a couple of decades (a little longer in big cities), Japanese and Thai food have really only been scooching their way into smaller cities and middle America for the last ten years or so.

Therefore, when this book was published, a lot of the ingredients were wholly unfamiliar to many people. Nowadays, lots of them will seem familiar: wasabi, pickled ginger, sesame oil, chili oil, lemongrass and so on. However, as much as you might be able to recognize the green paste on the corner of your sushi plate, do you really know what a whole wasabi root looks like? Or where you might find it in your asian grocery?

This book helps to break down the linguistic and cultural barrier, offering suggestions as to Asian names for common items, where you might find it, and what you can do with it. Asian grocery stores, by the way, are not just good sources for ingredients for Asian cuisines, I buy all of my fresh herbs at our local store because they are at least 50% cheaper than at the supermarket. You just have to know what you're looking for, and this book will most certainly help you find it!