Customer Reviews

Bruce Cost's Asian Ingredients: Buying and Cooking the Staple Foods of China, Japan and Southwest Asia

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

 

 

I have been eating asian food for decades -- only recently have I become interested in trying to cook it. The biggest barrier is understanding the use and purpose of Asian ingredients. This book demystifies things wonderfully and provides illustrative recipes showing the proper use and context of the spices, vegetables and ingredients necessary to authentic Asian food.

It's an invaluable resource and is obviously a huge amount of work went into researching and describing the use of foods in the various regions in Asia. For instance, I never noticed that the Japanese do not use garlic at all, while every other Asian country uses garlic extensively.

Too bad it's out of print -- pick up a used copy if you can. Some enterprising publisher should reprint it pronto. With the availability of Asian foods spreading outside the US major cities, this book is becoming more relevant than ever.

I bought this for my husband and son who love to read about food. Both are avid Asian foodies and very interested in unusual ingredients. It is encyclopedic and provides a huge amount of information. They love it. It would bore me to death. This is the standard text in the field.

I bought this book because I thought it would help me indentify unknown vegetables and other ingredients in the Asian Food Market. There are no color photographs and only a few black and white photos of some ingredients. Don't waste your money as I did.