Customer Reviews

Pacific Flavors: Oriental Recipes for a Contemporary Kitchen

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This is a great cookbook! It's got a great combination of basic and highly creative recipes. It seems that with many Chinese recipes and cookbooks, everything tastes similar, just with different ingredients. This book's recipes are very broad in concepts, flavors, presentation and preparation styles (some stir frys, barbeques, dumplings,sautes,sauces, etc.). If we could only have one Chinese cookook, this would be it.

Hugh Carpenter is one of my favorite cookbook authors: James Beard, Jacques Pepin and Rose Levy Berenbaum being the others. All write with explanations for the process---why you do something the way it is indicated in the recipe---is it the author's whim, tradition, or vital to a successful result?! Hugh Carpenter tells you what to do as far as preparation, whether it can be done in advance, and all needed information regarding the recipe, including plating the final results. What separates this book from so many other very good cookbooks is the actual recipes. If you want to try your hand at asian cooking, this would be my guide of choice. As Frommers travel guides are to the traveler, so are Carpenter/Sandeson's books to the intrepid cooks. As another reviewer stated, it is not recommended to 'blind' try a recipe for guests---that is, don't plan to serve an untried recipe for the first time to guests. But with this book (or any of his others, for that matter) you can do this fearlessly. The flavors are vibrant, bold and he tells you if you need to raise the level of heat. Do what he says: if he tells you something needs to marinate overnight, or be cooked a day in advance to allow the flavors to mellow or settle, DO IT! He and his wife have traveled all over the Pacific Rim and bring authentic flavors to the American cook who wants veracity and integrity in their cooking.

Out of +150 cookbooks we own, this is one of the top five. Hugh Carpenter isn't afraid to have you use spices to produce wonderful dishes. His method of separating the recipe into advance preparation and cooking is a great help in preparing something new. His serving sizes are very accurate and menu ideas useful. The photography is outstanding and an added plus in first time preparation. At a dinner party, we rarely dare to prepare a dish we haven't tried, but have done this on five occasions using "Pacific Flavors", all with compliments from everyone. This book is not only an excellent cookbook, but a beautiful coffee table piece also.

One of Carpenter's best books (and all of them are good). He constructs interesting foods with varied flavors. None of them (at least so far) are difficult to put together. He's consistently the best cook book author that I know of.

I just finished taking an oriental cuisine class less than a year ago and our wonderfully experienced teacher recommended this cookbook for continued enjoyment in oriental cooking and eating at home. I have truly enjoyed using this book. I am quite young so cooking is new and I really like the art of it. Carpenter and Sanderson I think are at there best by exposing us to meals designed complete with the use of the most exciting and eccentric flavors. This is my favorite part about eating, besides company and presentation. At any rate, I am glad to have begun to collect cookbooks with this as one of the first ones. Thanks!