Customer Reviews

Practical Korean Cooking

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is the book that Korean mothers buy for their daughters when they get married!!! It's as close to authentic as you can get.

This book is only $27.95 through barnesandnoble.co

Practical Korean Cooking is well worth the investment. Its easy to follow directions, supported by pictures with step by step directions make this one of the easiest Asian cookbooks to use. With its well laid out sections it is easy to plan a traditional Korean meal down to what the table should look like. The handy glossary of terms make it valuable to the seasoned cook or the beginner. A must have cookbook for the eclectic cook.

first of all- if you're going to buy any books by noh chin-hwa- make sure this is the one. i bought traditional side dishes by the author- and it was basically just a chapter cut out of this book. i should have listened to the person who also stated the fact in a review.

i'm twenty something- and this cookbook reminds me of my mom's chinese cookbooks from the 70's. Sure it's photography and dish ware are dated- but the recipes and instructions are fantastic. i'm completely leery of the recipe for raw liver, and it is true the instructions do seem very time consuming... however i read in Korean cuisine by wei-chaun- that a lot of traditional korean cooking techniques are very daunting tasks.

i bought about 6 korean cookbooks after eating at a korean restaurant- they all seem to have the same dishes with very little variation. this book however expands beyond the bulgogi... the chige...and the kimchi. One such item would be the fermented soy bean lumps. now i don't intend to try this recipe- but i found it really interesting that the instructions include- "remove the mold and dust from the fermented soybean lumps two days before using" I'm chinese american- so i'm pretty much used to weird ingredients. the american side of me however is pretty nitpicky about "is this clean? is that mold? is that still good?" i often buy dried wood ears- but because they have a faint white moldy look to them i'm reluctant to actually use them.

anyways this is what i consider to be what a cookbook should be. pictures of every single recipe and photos of instructions as well. i wish it also had photos of the ingredients- with the glossary area- but there are plenty of photos of the ingredients pre cooking- to get an idea of what to look for in the korean grocery stores. fabulous! worth the $$ !!!!

I refer to this book as the Betty Crocker of Korean Cooking because it reminds me of my mother's Betty Crocker from the 70s. The layout is very glossy with lots of colour photographs and step by step instructions in very dry, matter-of-fact, subject-verb-occassional predicate style. This book is probably not for you if you need it as a complete primer on Korean food or if you are the kind of cook who needs to know everything down to the last 1/8 of a tsp you will find this, and probably most Korean cookbooks, kind of frustrating as Koreans (like many cooks worldwide) are not really known for their exacting measuring in cooking ;-) If, however, you are the kind of cook who is familiar with Korean cuisine and wants guidelines on how to do it, this is THE BOOK for you!

For novices I would recommend Kwak's Dok Suni and for those more experienced cooks interested in a more cultural bent or just more background I would bundle this book with Heppinstall's Growing Up in a Korean Kitchen, which covers a lot of the same recipes but in a completely different format.

I was raised eating Korean food, but when I moved away from home, I didn't know how to cook it for myself. My sister uses this book, and now I do, too.

After spending a year in Korea, living on korean food, I found this book to be the best the I have found on the subject. The pictures of the raw ingredients, the preparation pictures, the finished dish pictures and the text were very well adapted to the novice american/korean cook. If you want real korean taste, get this book!

I found the book very easy to use, and the finished Korean dishes tasted just like those at my favorite Korean restaurant. Then one day I discovered the Korean cook in that restaurant had a set of "recipe cards" in Korean, with the exact same photos and same recipes! These recipes are "real."

Having been stationed in Korea, being taught a few dishes while there, eating at Korea House Restaurants in the US, I found these recipes to yield authentic flavors I initially found in Korea.

Over the years I've consistently stuck with and cooked a few traditional Korean dishes. The recipes in this book are wonderful and the flavor and aromas that have come from my own attempts at new and familiar recipes just splendid!

Highly recommended.

I'm the kind of cook who does not mind pinching the leaves individually off cilantro. I like to chop and prepare fresh vegetables in all kinds of futsy ways. However, I draw the line at recipes that ask me to pound cooked rice in a mortar to achieve a thick paste. Would a blender or food processor work? How about rice flour? Without hours of experimentation, I'll never know, and the author does not tell us...To it's credit, this book has wonderfully detailed instruction, but the preparation for most recipes is so intense that I don't find myself using it as a cookbook. For me, it's more of an "authentic" reference, a jumping-off point for creating meals with what's on hand...If you really want to make your own konju-jang or your own soy sauce, it's in there, but unless you're confined to the kitchen with nothing to do all day but cook, you may end up using this book as interesting reading material more than a "practical" cookbook.