Customer Reviews

DK Living: Yan-Kit's Classic Chinese Cookbook

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This cookbook provides excellent and easy to follow recipes for dishes from around China. Each recipe has a picture and useful information. The binding is of good quality, meaning you can flatten it while you're cooking without tearing it up. The dishes are oriented to authentic Chinese tastes, not Americanized junk food. The only drawback is that the recipes are English-only, without Chinese characters. Sometimes my wife (who is Chinese) cannot tell what ingredient is called for because of this.

The recipies in this cookbook tend to be slightly more fancy (and thus more time consuming)than absolutely neccesary, which can be good or bad, depending on your mood and patience. So I recommend having another, slightly simpler book for comparison, such as "Chinese Cooking" by the Wei Chuan company.

I was delighted to find this book at my local library. I grew up in Hong Kong, the food paradise, eating real Chinese food. Most Chinese cookbooks in English disappoint me with Americanized recipies (some of the entries I don't even recognized as Chinese food!). This cookbook though, contains most all Chinese food that I enjoy eating at home. I tried making a couple items, and I can testify the authenticity of the recipes. Some of the recipes are complicated, but I can find plenty recipes that are affordable and manageable. I think it's a must-have if you like cooking your own Chinese food in America.

As a Chinese who has eaten his way through incredible home-style and restaurant cooking on three continents, this is by far the best cookbook I've encountered on Chinese cuisine. The recipes are authentic and cover many of the most famous dishes (regional specialities included) familiar to real Chinese food connosieurs. The small, yet important detail of including the name of dishes in Chinese is something most Chinese cookbooks on the US market would do well in adopting. Be aware that the recipes and preparation aren't simple, a loyal reflection of the effort that goes into preparing fine Chinese dishes. Persistence will be rewarded with fine results.

This book introduced me to Chinese cooking, and although I now own a number of excellent Chinese cookbooks by such notables as Nina Simonds, Ken Hom, and Susanna Foo, I return to this book again and again. It covers a wide variety of dishes, from simple to complex. In addition to lots of great photos, there is good information on ingredients with which beginning cooks or cooks new to Chinese cooking may not be familiar. This book is a bargain and I keep mine within easy reach in my kitchen. I've made the simple fried rice time and again; although Susanna Foo's fried rice is delicious, it is much more labor-intensive than the fried rice recipe in Yan-Kit's book. Hint: try them both!

As far as the text is concerned, this is a five-star cookbook if ever there was one. For the familiar Chinese classics, it remains probably the best English-language source available, with creditable versions of every dish it includes, and some recipes (the sweet-and-sour pork, for instance) that are unmatched elsewhere. Yet, in contrast to earlier editions, this 2006 British republication now has problems in typeface and layout.

Unlike the 1998 American "DK Living" edition, where ingredients and recipes are printed in an easy-to-read bold typeface, the type used in the 2006 hardcover is small and thin; especially in the list of ingredients, the squeezed-together type is very hard to make out, and the fractional amounts can only be read (by me, at least) with a magnifying glass. Moreover, before I gave up, I found at least one instance where the centimeters-to-inches conversion was way off ("¼ inch" as the thickness of the pork cubes in that sweet-and-sour recipe).

Then there are the illustrations, usually the glory of a DK cookbook. In the "DK Living" edition, there are pictures of every dish, and they are breathtakingly styled and photographed; they are a lesson in how to make Chinese food look delicious and elegant without the vegetable cutouts or background chinoiserie of lesser publications. In the 2006 version, only some of the dishes are pictured; most of its best photos (the "ingredients" section at the beginning of the book) are those that appeared in the "DK Living" edition, and only the photo of Szechwan duck with lotus rolls is an improvement on the older picture. For the rest, the shallow-focus, hyper-colorful photos may be the current cookbook standard, but they don't measure up to the more austere beauty of the "DK Living" illustrations; they can misrepresent the recipe as given (for instance, the dark soy in the sweet-and-sour fish produces something much browner than the bright red sauce shown); and the sloppily shredded scallions atop the pang pang chicken look downright amateurish. Finally, the ingredient photos (and recipes) in the "DK Living" edition are accompanied by the names in Chinese, a useful addition for Chinese readers or when shopping.

Everyone interested in Chinese cooking should own this book; but the "DK Living" edition, a sturdy, well bound paperback, is the one to get.

Having grown up in Shanghai, I consider myself fairly familiar with authentic Chinese food. I have used many different Chinese cookbooks both written in Chinese and English, and Yan-Kit's Classic Chinese Cookbook is by far the best. For anyone who is not familiar with the ingredients and methods unique to Chinese culture, the book's first few chapters provide a great introduction. I have tried maybe 1/3 of the recipes, and all of them lead to good results. I highly recommand this excellent book.

When I first came to the states from China I brought a few Chinese cookbooks (in Chinese)with me, knowing how much I liked chinese food and how little I knew about cooking it. However, it was after I got this book that my cooking skills started to sky-rocket. The book is no doubt an excellent, excellent guide to Chinese cusine.

The first dish I tried is the Barbeque Pork. The recipe calls for 2 1/2 pounds of pork butt. I was very concerned with the fact that if the dish did not turn out all right, I would be stuck with so much meat. The first time I tried the dish, it come out beautifully. Then I tried the pearl balls recipe. The recipe was much easier than I thought and the result was great. What I like most about this cookbook is the many color pictures and illustrations. I own quite a few Chinese Cookbooks and this is the easiest one among all of them. I recommend it to every one who is interested in Chinese Cooking. You really get your money's worth: A lot of simple and tasty recipe!

This is quite a good book for those who would like to learn to cook Chinese food. Some of the "Chinese" or "Asian" cookbooks are sort of "Americanized" but not this one. For instance, the "Sweet and Sour Pork" which is very tasteful unlike those which you can get from Chinese fastfood which are dripping with red sauce. Another benefit of this book is that it has step by step instructions, and at the beginning of the book, she explains various types of Asian noodles, what type of knife to get, what is the proper way of cutting the meat or vegetables and how to fry, which I find extremely helpful. Most cookbooks do not explain how to do all this things and just give you the recipes, expecting you to know how to do everything. Also, it comes with colorful pictures of all the dishes which I find motivating (for me to try the recipes.)

This is the best authentic Chinese cook book one can have. The ingredients are easy to find outside Asia. The instructions are clear and the dishes are heavenly. After I have acquired this book, I become the best cook among my Chinese friends. Recently I went to Hong Kong to look for another Chinese cook book, I have to say I feel very disappointed. None of them are as good as this one. I highly recommend it.