Customer Reviews

Basic Asian: Everything You Need for Yin and Yang in the Kitchen

5 star:		(2)
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3 star:		(1)
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I bought this book as a gift for my daughter who was interested in learning Asian cooking. Knowing very little about the food, this was a perfect introduction. We have both started using it and found it to be very informative and easy to understand. The recipes cover all regions (from India to Japan and China to Vietnamese and Thai)so you are able to try out many different types of Asian cuisine in one handy book. Photos of ingredients and finished dishes are provided for each recipe. But this book is more than recipes! Half the book is devoted to the ingredients: the basics, what you should have on hand, what you should try, what is expensive and not for everyone, etc. There is a basic shopping list of ingredients and we found this very helpful when visiting our international grocery! Even if you are not a fan of Asian food, if you love to cook this is a great book to learn new ingredients, tastes, and styles. Lovely book, great gift, and great resource for any chef.

This is my go to book for Asian cooking. The recipes are always easy to follow, fairly simple to put together and always delicious. It has a great section on the various key ingredients and spices used in Asian cooking and the helpful hints sprinkled throughout the book are really helpful. I have a large library of Asian and Middle Eastern cooking books, but when I want something that I can really count on for dinner, I reach for this book.

I own the French version of this. It's got a lovely layout (the detailed presentation of ingredients is quite nice), and a handy organisation with pictures. The recipes are straightforward, and it serves as a good introduction to Asian cooking. For anyone really interested in authentic cooking, though, I'd get something else: the recipes are sometimes outright weird (the fried rolls are made with wonton squares instead of rice sheets, for instance), and their contents seem to be more suitable for goi cuon, the non-fried salad rolls), and there's a whole tone of "mystical/philosophical" about the presentation of Asian cooking that can get really annoying (it might be fine for Westerners, but as a half-Vietnamese I don't particularly feel like being patronised in such a clichéd way).