Customer Reviews

Low-Fat Korean Cooking: Fish, Shellfish & Vegetables

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

 

 

My only regret is that I found out later that you can get this book as part of the compilation "Practical Korean Cooking." Anyway, I tried some of the recipes for my Korean-American friends. One of my signature dishes is now the Hobakchon - fried zucchini. It came out quite tasty. Next I'll try the cold seeweed and cucumber soup. What I like best about the book is the many color pictures. It was helpful, esp. since Korean food, like many Asian cuisines, is as much about presentation as taste.

Ever get tired of eating the same old stuff? Well, this book has a lot of great ideas for meals, using familiar ingredients. Korean food is one of my favorite types of food, and I just love this book. It's got so much stuff in it. Definitely worth the money.

The three glossy, Golden Book styled Korean cookbooks by Noh Chin-hwa and Copyreader Shirley A. Dorow form a rather oddly titled collection of pretty good recipes covering the width and breadth of Korean cuisine. One really wishes these three volumes had been published as a single volume, especially as there is no index spanning the three volumes. These books are entitled `Healthful Korean Cooking, Meats & Poultry', `Low-Fat Korean Cooking Fish, shellfish & Vegetables', and `Traditional Korean Cooking, Snacks and Basic Side Dishes'.

Aside from the very non-European way of organizing these topics, the most difficult thing may be the mislabelling of various Korean techniques. Classic Korean barbecue is really a high heat fast cooking method, much more like grilling than smoke-based slow cooking barbecue. It's most distinguishing feature is that it is done on the tabletop on a grill very similar to the Japanese Hibachi. In other places, the name `broiling' is given to what is essentially another instance of grilling.

While I have eaten several meals at a Korean restaurant, I have never reviewed other books on Korean cuisine, so I can only judge this as if I were judging a book on French or Italian or Southern American cuisine.

One very dramatic feature of all three volumes is the fact that each and every recipe is accompanied with a series of very good color pictures illustrating the main steps in the procedure. This is in addition to a larger picture of the completed dish. Another very good aspect of the photographs in these books is that all the dishes are plated on similarly colored and shaped plates, so the essential difference from photo to photo is in the food and not in the crockery.

The photographer really gets a chance to do his stuff with the double page pics of typical table settings.

While it does me little good, I liked the fact that each dish is clearly named with an English name, a Korean name in English script, and the Korean name in Korean pictographs. For Korean speaking readers, I suspect this is a good thing.

The one thing I found most annoying about the way the recipes were written is in the fact that the list of ingredients is not in tabular form. That is, the amount and name of the first ingredient begins at the beginning of the first line, followed immediately by the amount and name of the second ingredient without a line break, if there is room remaining on the first line.

Ultimately, the most annoying thing about this collection is that the division of dishes between the volumes makes little sense to a Western cook, there is no combined index, and so much material in the introductions, glossaries, and table setting pics is duplicated in all three books.

And yet, until I review any more Korean cookbooks, these volumes' strengths outweigh its weaknesses if you are an amateur cook and really want to reproduce dishes from your local Korean eatery. I would prefer seeing a more general approach similar to the many excellent books on European cuisines such as Diane Kochilas' book on Greek food and Penelope Casas' early book on Spanish food.

This was my first Korean cookbook and I am not that impressed with it. What is good about it is that there are many photographs (step-by-step for most recipes which is very nice), the recipes are all lowfat and healthy, and the recipes are very representative of what Koreans actually eat. Many Asian dishes are very Americanized these days. Anyway, my main issue with this book is that some of the ingredients are going to be impossible to find unless you live in an area that has a substantial Korean population and Korean market. I find the organization of the ingredients and instructions for each recipe to be very cluttered. The pages actually look too "busy." I also prefer my ingredients to be in list format and the ingredient lists in this book are in a paragraph-like format. There are much better Korean cookbooks out there. Get something else.