Have one to sell? Sell yours here
Tell the Publisher!
I'd like to read this book on Kindle

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.
Sorry, this item is not available in
Image not available for
Color:
Image not available

To view this video download Flash Player

 

Asian Vegetables: From Long Beans to Lemongrass, A Simple Guide to Asian Produce Plus 50 Delicious, Easy Recipes [Paperback]

Sara Deseran , Richard Jung , Barbara Tropp
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)


Available from these sellers.


Image
Save on Popular Books This Summer
Browse our Bookshelf Favorites store for big savings on popular fiction, nonfiction, children's books, and more.

Book Description

June 2001
For anyone who has ever been dazzled but daunted at the Asian market, here is an indispensable, easy-to-use guide to identifying, choosing, and preparing these wonderfully unusual vegetables. From Amaranth and Bok Choy to Lotus Root and Lemongrass, food editor and writer Sara Deseran describes clearly the exotic array of Asian produce now widely available, explaining everything you need to know to shop confidently. This lavishly photographed resource is rounded out with 50 contemporary recipes, from Edamame with Szechwan Pepper-Salt to Stir-fried Shrimp and Garlic Chives. Asian Vegetables takes the mystery out of these enticing ingredients and puts the flavor in for fabulously healthy and delicious meals.


Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A guide to shopping for Asian vegetables (which often appear under many different names), this book also helps browsers figure out what to do with them once they're sitting on the counter. Deseran, food editor of the house organ Williams-Sonoma Taste, organizes her recipes according to the types of produce they require: leafy greens (Steamed Halibut with Sweet Miso Wrapped in Cabbage), roots (Crisp Taro Pancakes with Hoisin-Lime Dipping Sauce), squashes (Stir-Fried Luffa Squash with Diced Shrimp and Garlic), beans and other miscellaneous vegetables (Sukhi Singh's Bharta), and herbs and aromatics (Grilled Lemongrass-Tamarind Pork Chops with Chayote Slaw). For each vegetable, she covers alternate names, varieties, uses and storage for example, the many varieties of bok choy, or Chinese white cabbage, are described, along with such recipes as Braised Short Ribs with Hearts of Bok Choy, and Bok Choy, Water Chestnut, and Bacon Chow Mein. Deseran's tone is light (long beans look "like a vegetable out of a Dr. Seuss book"), and she can be charming even in defeat, as when admitting her failure to interest her husband in bitter melon. Richard Jung's color photographs are clear and appetizing, and make identifying the vegetables that much easier. Deseran's book is a handy, practical companion to a shopping trip to Chinatown, and her recipes are terrific. (June 1)Forecast: This attractive paperback will do particularly well in urban areas where a diverse selection of vegetables is more common. Although it may be less comprehensive than the recent The Asian Grocery Store Demystified, it has more recipes and a better layout.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Sara Deseran is the food editor of 7x7 magazine in San Francisco. She has contributed to such publications as Saveur and The San Francisco Chronicle as well as serving as food editor for Taste magazine.

Richard Jung is a San Francisco-based food and travel photographer whose previous books include Balsamico.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 132 pages
  • Publisher: Chronicle Books (June 2001)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0811827593
  • ISBN-13: 978-0811827591
  • Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 8.2 x 0.6 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,100,533 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars
(5)
4.0 out of 5 stars
Share your thoughts with other customers
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars A poor man's "Amaranth to Zucchini" July 24, 2004
Format:Paperback
This is a good guide to the produce you'll find in an Asian market, and it gives you a decent idea of what you can do with that bitter melon or mustard cabbage after you've brought it home. It's a good book -- but I can't work up my enthusiasm for it.

For one thing: even though the photography is attractive, it's not terribly useful. Presumably to both save money and to give a sense of size-and-scale, most of the vegetable photos have several items in the same picture (Chinese broccoli next to choy sum next to mustard cabbage), with little circles (TOO-little circles) indicating the item highlighted in the text. The veggie photos are also smaller than the recipe photos; personally, I'd rather a good hard look at a healthy bunch of greens than a full-page picture of Asian gumbo with mustard cabbage and chinese sausage (however appealing that recipe might be).

The information given is also... well, not quite minimal, but far from exhaustive. While the entry for Lotus root in Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini is two or three pages (plus recipes), there's really only 3 paragraphs devoted to it here. It's good information, mind you, just not that much of it.

But note that I do give the book 4 stars. If you're completely new to Asian cooking, then this inexpensive book may be helpful (and a fatter book would be overwhelming).
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars A little too limited in category November 11, 2001
Format:Paperback
This book would've ordinarily been a very good book, however, with a few of the same kinds of books available at the same time, I believe that you should shop around before purchasing this one. I have looked at several with the same theme and have found that "Asian Greens" is more concise and lists 3x more vegetables than this book and offers 30 more recipes than this book. Yes the pictures are very beautiful but so are the ones in "Asian Greens". For an informative guide, I would have to go with "Asian Greens" -- unfortunately, I picked up this one first and have since bought "Asian Greens" to help me pick Asian vegetables at the markets.
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars An Average Book, not up to Standards on the Subject February 3, 2005
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
`Asian Vegetables' by first time author, Sara Deseran is a lightweight entry into the world of books about Asian cooking. While there may not be as many heavyweight classics as there are in English for Italian, French, or Mediterranean cuisines, there are important classics against which one's efforts must be measured. The heavyweight in the area of guides to Asian ingredients is `Bruce Cost's Asian Ingredients', updated in 2000.

For starters, for roughly the same list price in paperback, Cost's classic has twice as many pages, covers all ingredients, not just vegetables, and presents vegetables and all other products in a greater depth than Ms. Deseran's book. For starters, Deseran does not include the Latin scientific names for her vegetables, which is doubly annoying as she herself says, most of the vegetables have different names, even in different parts of China, let alone different names in Japan and Thailand. So, the only way to be sure we are talking about the same thing is to give the one name that is guaranteed to be the same across all books.

Ms. Deseran has one opportunity to gain a march on Cost's book by providing color photographs of almost all of the plants she discusses, but this feature is, to my mind, done poorly. In an attempt to compare and contrast the appearance of related vegetables, the photographs are all `family pictures'. Thus, for example, one picture of four oriental members of the cabbage family is so small that I am very hard pressed to see the differences between the four vegetables in the photograph, and I am hard pressed to see the difference between choy sum (Chinese flowering cabbage) and the Mediterranean veggie, broccoli Rabe (rapini). This brings up another weakness with the book.

One of the main features of the book is the recipes presented for each featured ingredient. One problem with these recipes is that relatively few of these ingredients are available outside of an Oriental market in a large city such as New York or San Francisco. My local very well stocked megamart probably carries less than a third of the ingredients in this book. One of the virtues of Bruce Cost's book is that since it covers all types of Asian products, including meat, fish, noodles, sauces, and grains, the average coverage is probably better than half, as grains, noodles, and fish are much more common than many vegetables. So, even though Ms. Deseran says that most oriental leafy greens are almost entirely interchangeable with one another, this doesn't help if you can't find any. It would have made the recipes much more useful if the author had provided substitutions, especially for the leafy green vegetables and the squashes.

Even on the subjects on which both Deseran and Cost have articles, Cost's information is deeper and generally more useful. While Deseran has articles on `Ginger' and `Galangal and Turmeric', Cost has several pages on the `Ginger family', including individual articles on `Ginger', `Galangal', `Turmeric', `Mioga Ginger', and `Lesser Galangal'. For the ginger family, both books provide two soup recipes featuring ginger and Galangal. Deseran gives the usual short paragraph to ginger, while Cost gives two pages to ginger, including a discussion of `baby ginger' and ginger shoots. Cost also covers dried and powdered preparations made from ginger and turmeric, which are beyond the scope of Deseran's book. Deseran does cover a fairly sizable number of non-vegetable topics in her `pantry glossary', but most entries offer little substantial information. For example, there is a paragraph on chicken broth, which gives no recipe for same, and makes no mention, like Cost, that the Asian chicken broth is an entirely different preparation than it's French or Italian cousins. She simply suggests you use a commercial western style organic chicken broth. This point alone makes me question the depth to which Ms. Deseran has seriously researched her subject.

Oddly, Ms. Deseran's bibliography is very respectable and includes `Bruce Cost's Asian Ingredients'. It almost seems she knows of this important work, but has never read it. Ms. Deseran's patron and inspiration for this book is noted Chinese cookbook author, Barbara Tropp, whose `The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking' has all the cachet and quality of a Chinese `Mastering the Art of French Cooking' by Julia Child. And, Ms. Tropp agrees with Mr. Cost in clearly distinguishing Chinese from French broth by leaving out the vegetables and adding ginger. So much for packaged supermarket stocks!

One attraction found in Ms. Deseran's book is the anecdotes by noted chefs on Oriental ingredients. I found these contributed virtually nothing to the value of the book.

Virtually the only situation in which it seems Ms. Deseran's book may have an edge over Bruce Cost's work is if you happen to live near a first class Asian market which stocks a good variety of fresh ingredients and the color pictures can serve as an aid in identifying the products. But then, Cost's book becomes more valuable, as it offers an excellent guide to how to make the best of Asian markets, something Ms. Deseran does not cover, except to note how to care for the vegetables once you have them.

This is really an average book, so my three stars simply reflects that this book offers virtually nothing when compared to the standard works on the subject.
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Search Customer Reviews
Only search this product's reviews





Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store

If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store. Learn more

Forums

There are no discussions about this product yet.
Be the first to discuss this product with the community.
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 



So You'd Like to...


Create a guide


Look for Similar Items by Category