Customer Reviews

Quick & Easy Vietnamese: Home Cooking for Everyone [QUICK & EASY VIETNAMESE]

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Update May, 2006:
Watch out for the salt content on some of the recipes for chicken that also has a cooking sauce, such as Chicken with Mushrooms and Lemon Grass Chicken. I reccommend 1/2 teaspoon salt for 10 oz of meat or 1 teaspoon per pound of meat; you can always add more but you can't remove them once they're in.

Original review:
This is a nice cookbook with no personal or cultural anecdotes, just simple recipes with practical ingredients and very good results. The recipes are laid out one per page, with photographs of the dish, the ingredients and preparation. With so much photos, the instructions are necessarily streamlined, which works for many of the recipes except for a few, like beef pho. Telling one to combine all the ingredients in boiling stock and cook over low heat just won't do for pho. It assumes you know a thing or two about preparing this soup, like how long to simmer it. I reccommend at least an hour or more.

There is a wonderful recipe for chicken simmered in coconut juice and flavored with Maggie sauce, which is essentially Ga Roti in my book. It tastes just like my mom's and no other vietnamese cookbook I've come across have it. In fact, the ingredients the author uses are exactly my mom's, except she would measure in pinches and tads and touches of this and that. Ditto for the caramelized pork and eggs (thit kho & trung).

There is also an ingredients list containing color photographs that is handy for shopping.

Overall, a good selection of easy, homey, delicious recipes like bun rieu, bun suong (another hard to find recipe), and vietnamese sandwiches. Also, if you like cookbooks that contain more photos of how to prepare the food and optimal (minimal) use of words, this is a good choice.

I have gone through many expensive Vietnamese cook books and have not used a single recipe out of them because they're difficult or "it's not the way my mom made it." This book show pictures of the ingredients so you know what to look for in an Asian store and pictures of the end product. If I don't know the name of a dish I can look at the picture and recognize it. I tried learning from my mom but as everyone knows most women from Vietnam don't measure, it's a little of this and some of that. So some of the time my recipes are just right and other times they weren't. My mom would try to explain what a certain ingredient was but would not know the English name for it. This book explains it all. Very easy to follow recipes and they turn out just like "the way my mom made it."

I am Vietnamese and moved to France with my parents in 1946. My mother was an exquisite cook. I unfortunately did not benefit from her gift. However, when I turned 30 I began to ask for recipes from my cousins. I have bought 5-6 copies pf this book for my children and friends. It is the most concise Vietnamese cookbook. The illustrations are very helpful.

I've tried about half of the receipes in this book and it taste great! I love the simple instructions and pictures of all the items you need to make the entree. Wish all cookbooks were like this! Although I have to say they used the wrong wrap for making the eggrolls. The one they pictured isn't ideal for deep frying.

I wanted to give this book only a FOUR STARS rating, but I couldn't edit that part; so it shows a five stars rating instead.

This book is good for beginners who want to cook Vietnamese food on a superficial level but do not want to delve too deeply into Vietnamese cuisine. The author, Andre Nguyen, is a Vietnamese chef who owns a Vietnamese restaurant, so he knows how to cook very well. The recipes have only a few ingredients that are easy to find in a Vietnamese or Chinese supermarkets, and they taste good. If you want 100% authentic Vietnamese recipes which will take quite some time to prepare, then this book is not for you. But if you want good Vietnamese recipes that have been simplified by substituting ingredients that are easier to find and make, then this book is definitely for you. This book also has great color photos of every recipe, so they're very helpful. This book is not meant to be comprehensive or detailed, rather it is meant for people who want to put Vietnamese food on the table fast! If you're really serious about learning how to cook Vietnamese food, then I would recommend Andrea Nguyen's "Into The Vietnamese Kitchen" and Mai Pham's "Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table".

I have been a fan of Vietnamese food for many years, however I have always gone to a restaurant for it. These instructions, including the pictures of the ingrediants, make it very easy to make the dishes yourself. I just take the cookbook with me to the market when I am shopping.

I bought this book because I'm new to Vietnamese cooking and I thought it would be a good starter cookbook. It was disappointing to say the least. A lack of instructions does not make it easy for me. I don't like guessing at what I'm supposed to do. There are various things that leave you scratching your head - like one recipe that lists coconut milk and then neglects to tell you what you're supposed to do with it.

There are plenty of pictures but even some of them are incorrect.
Some recipes will list an ingredient and then show a picture of something different. My Vietnamese friend says that some of the recipes are not even Vietnamese!

I did make a few of the recipes that turned out good but I'm looking for something better.

I'm Viet but I was born in America. I only learned how to cook a couple of Vietnamese dishes from my parents but I have been looking for a good cookbook. This one is my favorite so far! There are pictures of every dish AND step by step pictures! SOOOO helpful! And because there are pictures of each dish, I recognized almost all of them even if I didn't know exactly what it was called.

This book is PERFECT for me (the amateur cook wanting to replicate Vietnamese homecooking for my own family)!

5 STARS!!

Pictures of asian ingredients used made this book so easy to use. Plus ingredients are inexpensive and can be used for more than 1 recipe throughout the book. Pictures of each dish make each recipe visually appealing. Plus step-by-step pictures as well.

Most of these recipes are one page each, with a main picture, an ingredient list, and four small pictures chronicling the four "simple" steps on each page. This layout works well with a truly simple dish like Fresh Spring Rolls (Goi Cuon).

They work not so well for more complicated dishes. For Tomato and Crab Noodles (Bun Rieu), the last (fourth) step instructs: "Pour meat mixture into boiling stock. Season stock with fish sauce and sugar. Add tomato. In a large bowl, place noodles and pour over soup." OK, how long is the meat mixture in stock supposed to be cooked at boiling? Should the heat be turned down at some point to cook the mixture (because it can quickly get overly dry)? What about the tomatoes? Is this a simple blanching to peel off the tomato skin? Or should the tomatoes be cooked until they're softened? A few of the meat dishes require marinating but too many leave out the length of marinade time.

In short, for the sake of keeping the recipes seemingly simple, the instructions leave out too many critical details.

I appreciate the ingredients page with pictures at the beginning, but it is by no means comprehensive. And I wish that if the recipe called for unusual ingredients like Vietnamese soy sauce (which I can't find in NYC's Chinatown) then it would suggest substitutes. I also agree with some of the previous reviewers who said some of these recipes are too salty, almost inedibly so.

Despite all these criticisms, I still give this a cookbook 4 stars because if you have some experience with cooking, and if you have eaten enough homemade Vietnamese food, you can recreate your favorite dishes relatively easily and reliably. I appreciate the simple 1-2-3-4 approach as it seems less intimidating than some of the Vietnamese cookbooks I have -- books that are lovely to look at but don't inspire me to try because they seem so laborious. I now cook with this one and occasionally reference the others if there's a missing step here or there in these recipes. Try this book. You just have to experiment with these recipes and you'll soon be able to fill in the gaps that will allow you to cook some very tasty Vietnamese meals.