Customer Reviews

Ken Hom's Chinese Kitchen: With a Consumer's Guide to Essential Ingredients

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Unlike the reviewer that hated this book, I found Ken Hom's guide to Chinese ingredients extremely helpful in navigating the unfamiliar world of Chinese cooking. Mr. Hom lists all of the essential ingredients, and tips on what brands to buy. If you want to step away from the gooey Sweet-n-Sour glop of Americanized Chinese cuisine and into the THE REAL THING, buy this book.

It appears the book was first published in the UK, where Mr. Hom has a BBC TV cooking show, and some of the ingredients are listed in metric with English names for ingredients (i.e., corn flour instead of corn starch).

Hey have you ever wondered how do they do it? Look no further when you have tried the rest now try the best! Of all the chinese cook books I have read i never could get what you find at the good resturants. This is the one to buy. Frist of all he tells you where you can find all those so foriegn ingrediants. Heck who knows or what for that matter where you can get black bean sauce. If you ever tried to make a dish from some other chinese cook book and thought this doesn't tastes so good maybe it's because you couldn't find the right stuff! I say get this one you will be happy there's no other chinese cook book in the world that will give what this one can!

I pride myself on authentic tasting Chinese food and I used to think Hom was too 'white bread' for my tastes. This book changed my mind about him. I bought this book for its first half which gives extensive information on Chinese cooking ingredients likely to be unfamiliar to non-Chinese Americans. However, I've come to value it more for its recipes. Hom's meals run to the slighty dry but very tasty side. You won't find thick, syrupy, sweet concoctions here. I've since also bought his book "Easy Family Recipes from a Chinese-American Childhood" and find it consistent with this one (which means I recommend it nearly as highly).

I got this book as a gift when I expressed an interest in learning to cook Chinese food. I now have about six Asian cookbooks and have finally decided to give them away because none of them have helped me learn to cook anything decent.

"Ken Hom's Chinese Kitchen" suffers from the usual maladies afflicting Asian cookbooks. For starters, it was originally written for a UK audience and poorly (or not at all) translated for American users. Prawns? Courgettes? Aubergines? I'd like to be able to cook without having a dictionary in my other hand.

Along with this is the fact that the recipes were originally metric, and metric recipes don't translate well into standard measurements. This is just a fact. I've seen it with Italian and Indian cookbooks too. For whatever reason, the recipes never come out right.

Tied into that is that, even though I followed the recipes to a T, they came out uniformly tasting like they'd been soaked in motor oil. If this is how authentic Chinese food is supposed to be, give me the fake takeout stuff any day! At least it doesn't taste like coal slag.

Having said that, if you're hardy enough to continue trying to make Chinese food, this is the book to get, if only because of the guide to ingredients. It is really sensational, with full-color photos, exhaustive descriptions, and recommended brands. This is a huge help if you're just starting out, and will save you from wandering around your local Asian market completely lost and/or buying the wrong item/brand. This is the reason I give the book two stars. Without the guide it'd be zero.

It's a shame this one is so hard to find. There is another one by Martin Yan, with similar ingredient brand-name comparisons.

To the reviewer who rated it only 2 stars because its conventions weren't 'American' enough, it's a matter of education. In case you haven't noticed, the rest of the world (including our Canadian neigbors) uses the metric system. Do the math (it's not that hard), or get a Metric conversion chart -- not all of the world's cookbooks were written just for Americans.

I dislike the fromat, which is clumsy and repetitive. For me the ingredient list in both English and american measurements is tedious and unnecessary

This book provides excellent information on the Chinese spices that you can't get in other books. This is why I bought it.

I LOVE this book! I use it as a reference quite frequently, even though I cook "Chinese" quite often! My mother, a chef, gave me this book when I first left home - I think she was trying to cut down on my phone bills, calling to ask a thousand questions on what to buy, what to look for, a technique I'd not quite remembered. I would recommend this to anyone, and have purchased a few to pass along to friends who want to learn to "cook Chinese"!

This book's author and editor have wasted 95 pages out of 199 pages just to elaborate the "essential ingredients." and once the recipes started, they used very disturbing quantity measurements almost on every item with xxx g/xx lb/xxx oz, then used weird names such as "spring onions(US scallions)" for the already known "scallions, green onion," cornflour(US cornstarch), and furthermore, divided a dish with confusing and/or unnecessary "shopping list," "staples," with "preparation time" and "cooking time." The type of the printing is also too small to be read smoothly and fast. The oz/g/lb and USxxxx names almost drove me nuts! Some of the photos even placed food in chipped plates or bowls is another rarity in recipes books. Also, why treated readers as morons and need to repeat in all the recipes with the same "how to wash," "how to mix" the same ingredient?! Lot of the photos and food were placed in greasy, ugly containers and on dirty, shabby (back)ground. The only good stuff of this book is that some of the dishes are actually pretty okay, albeit authentic.