Customer Reviews

Ken Hom's Simple Thai Cookery

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

 

 

In Simple Thai Cookery, Ken Hom teaches simple but mouth-watering thai dishes that are easy to prepare at home. From Shrimp Soup to Thai Fried Rice and Green and Red Curries, each recipe is illustrated with step-by-step photographs. This makes it easy to follow directions and you'll know what the end product is supposed to look like. I also liked his descriptions of Thai ingredients and once you have a few key items, rest of the recipe is easy to follow.

Highly recommended!

This cookbook offers recipes from all over Thailand and is so gorgeously illustrated you want to eat the pages. The photographs which accompany the recipe steps complete the "perfect cookbook package." I loved this cookbook enough to buy two!

My wife and I wanted to learn how to make excellent Thai food. We had tried 2-3 other Thai cookbooks, and made some tasty dishes out of them, but never anything that came close to what we could get at a decent Thai restaurant. Ken Hom's book has changed all that, and is probably the last Thai cookbook we'll ever need. It has all the classic dishes that we were looking for, especially curries and various fried rice dishes. The instructions are basic and easy to follow, with helpful photographs along the way. We're pretty experienced home cooks, but I think someone who was a beginner would be able to make the recipes work, as long as they followed the directions.

And the food! Nothing we've made has disappointed. We've tried 6-8 dishes so far, and everything has been excellent. Honestly, we would have tried more dishes by now, but some of what we tried was so good we just couldn't wait to make it again. We have been especially impressed that the real flavor or Thai food is there--these taste like things we'd order in a good restaurant, and not like something we've made out of a cookbook. That's all the more impressive given that we have had to use some of Hom's suggested substitutes for ingredients we just couldn't find (e.g., lime zest instead of kaffir lime leaves). The red pork curry and classic fried rice were simply outstanding, both an A+; the weakest dish so far has been the tom kha gai, which I'd probably give a B/B+. But we'll be making that one again, even so. As for spiciness: we like our Thai food very spicy, and I find Hom's recipes to be a little bit tame; but it's very easy to just add a little more chili pepper, as desired. Again, every time we decide to cook Thai food, it's a debate between trying another new dish and going back to something we already know we love.

Be advised, the book is published by the BBC, and we had a little trouble finding it in the US. But we had been cooking out of a library copy, and after we'd renewed it too many times we decided we had to have our own; believe me, it was well worth the effort.

This book makes it easy to cook great Thai food at home. Typical ethnic cookbooks list pages of specialized ingredients and what looks to be hours of prep time for the simplest dishes. This book keeps the ingredients list small and the steps simple. The results are nothing less then mouth watering. We have made the majority of the recipes in this book with many becoming go to recipes in our home. Additionally, we have gone onto purchase additional books in this series which have introduced us to more simple, yet tasty ethnic foods we can cook at home.

I turn to this book as my reference book when I want to cook some staple dishes of Thai cuisine and don't feel like getting lost in a jungle of more sophisticated recipes, as it is often the case with other books, and yet retain some authenticity in the dishes I cook.

Though I have never been to Thailand, hence I have little idea of what authentic Thai food should taste like, I find Ken Hom to call for quite a lot of garlic in many of his recipes, which leaves me a bit perplexed, to the point I often end up adapting recipes or looking them up in other cookbooks or on the internet.

Overall, I like this book as a great starting point for a simple and quick Thai meal, great if you aspire to familiarise yourself with the most popular Thai recipes and give your dishes a fairly authentic taste, but are not an "authenticity-freak" and can't be bothered spending hours putting all ingredients together from scratch.

Suggested further readings:
If you're looking for the most comprehensive and authoritative book on Thai cooking and culture, David Thompson's "Thai Food" is "the bible".
If you like beautiful pictures along with your recipes and an insight on Thai culture and regional cuisines, check out "Thailand: The Beautiful Cookbook".
For a more narrative type of book with great stories about Thai food and culture with good recipes too, "It rains fishes" by Kasma Loha-Unchit is hard to beat.
I also like the Lonely Planet World Food guide to Thailand, as a pocket sized travel guide to Thailand for foodies.

As the title suggests the recipes are simple and easy to make. The pictures are mouth watering. My only disappointment is that a couple of my favorite Thai dishes weren't included.