Customer Reviews

Chinese Cookery Secrets: How to Cook Chinese Restaurant Food at Home (Right Way S.)

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

 

 

At last, here are recipes for some of our favorite dishes from every-day, non-gourmet Chinese restaurants! Among these are Lemon Chicken, Chicken Chow Mein, Sweet & Sour Pork, Kung-Pao Chicken, Twice-cooked Pork, and Hot & Sour Soup. You won't find every dish on your favorite restaurant's menu, but there are several good mainstays. On the down side, there are also some recipes for items I've never seen in a Chinese restaurant, like squid and lamb dishes. Also, in a few recipes, the measurements are difficult to translate, like "1/3 pint of chicken stock (200 ml)"...how much is that in cups? But most recipes are fairly simple and easy to follow. Overall the book is very thorough, covering specialty Chinese ingredients, cooking equipment & methods, and even authentic Chinese serving and drinking customs. I bought the book hoping to be able to re-create my favorite Chinese take-out dishes at home, and there are enough recipes for these that I am satisfied.

I've been looking for a cookbook on american chinese restaurant cooking. I had thought this was the one. It's not. HOWEVER, if you tweak the recipes a bit you can get good results.

Their chow mein is made with pan fried noodles, which would make it a lo mein. Their sweet and sour is immensely more sour than sweet. My brother who can handle just about anything didn't like it. And there were only about ten recipes out of at least seventy that were truly something as a main entree in an american chinese restaurant, but they weren't exact.

The good side of this book; it teaches the basic format of how to cook chinese correctly, so you can go through any recipe you find else where and change it to fit. There's a seasoned oil, a basic stock, an egg/flour batter for deep frying and how to marinate meat correctly. These make a big difference in the flavor of what you get.

It's worth it to learn how to cook correctly. But don't trust the ingredients if you're use to the chinese restaurant that serves bright red sweet and sour and chow mein that has more vegetables than meat.

This is an essential book - don't let the unknown author and the low price fool you.

This book is the only book I've found to have the proper marinades. That is a good part of the battle of Chinese cooking.

The book also contains the correct cutting instructions.

If you are just starting out, or an advanced Chinese cook, you need this book on your shelf. The recipes are reliable and consistent. The technique that this teaches you is just as indispensible as La Methode!

My only regret is that the publisher cheaped out on illustrations - a few good colour plates would be a welcome addition.

This book does describe how Chinese food is made in many of America's restaurants. Unfortunately, making food this way AT HOME could be an ordeal unless one wishes to cook Chinese food day after day.

Nonetheless, there are many bits of information that can be easily applied at home to make our attempts MORE like what we find in Chinese restaurants. Many of the recipes included are not the typical dishes found in Chinese buffet restaurants (at least in my region of the country), but some are,including twice-cooked pork and chicken with bamboo shoots and mushrooms. I would suggest using this book as a methodology and basics primer. You can then take other recipes, use the methodology, and add the ingredients almost always present in the recipes of this book (rice wine and the unique oriental soup stock, for example). Or, in other instances, you can almost guess the ingredients based on the patterns here!

This is a wonderful book. It has lots of details and very easy to follow. There may be a need to tweek some receipes to suit your pallate. I have read this book time and again and written personally to to thank the author. He was kind enough to respond. Indeed a lovely book !! I just wish it had the photo of each receipe. But what more can we expect from such a low priced book. Congratulations to Deh.

Nader Alnajjar

This book purports to provide cookery secrets which will allow the reader to prepare 'Chinese restaurant food' at home. As far as the 'secrets' go, there are a *few* good tips and techniques that are not covered in other Chinese cook books, but that is about it. Beyond this, the book is not a great deal more than a collection of fairly pedestrian recipes. It is true, however, that the recipes are recipes for dishes that one typically encounters in Chinese restaurants in the west and , from that perspective, the book provides what it promises. That being said though, the work as a whole suffers a few major deficiencies:

1) No photographs. There are a few ink drawings here and there but they are not all that good. Pictures of finished dishes are a must for a good cookbook, in my opinion, and the lack of them here prevented me from giving a third star;

2) Despite the fact that recipes are, more or less, recipes for popular restaurant dishes, they are not terribly interesting. Deh-Ta Hsiung has written an excellent book called Chinese Kitchen, The: A Book of Essential Ingredients with Over 200 Easy and Authentic Recipes (which I have also reviewed) but almost every other book he has authored or co-authored is typified by mediocre recipes. This book is no exception to that general rule, unfortunately; and,

3) The author provides the Chinese Character titles for each dish (which I very much like) but he is a bit careless about providing the proper pinyin form and, especially when the English name is not a direct translation of the Chinese, he fails to provide any information about why a given dish is so-named. I also think that an 'expert' on Chinese cuisine might take a little more care to be accurate when declaring certain historical facts (Kung Po and Yu Hsiang are two examples).

All in all, I would not recommend this even to beginners.